The rise of voice chat in online videogames has inevitably led to a growth in bad behavior between players—it is, after all, a lot easier to scream slurs and abuse at other people than it is to stop playing and type them out. Moderating that sort of toxicity is tough, and some companies are turning to AI to help crack down on the worst of it. Speaking at GDC, Roblox Senior Technical Director Kiran Bhat and Voice Safety Lead Hannes Heikinheimo said Roblox has been using machine learning voice chat moderation for a year and has had good success with it—but acknowledged that sometimes, actual human beings are better at the job.
"Moderating voice in real time sounds really daunting, because to get the voice moderated, you not only have to know what the person is saying, but you also want to capture the tone and the intensity of what is being said to decide whether something is toxic or not," Bhat said during the talk. "There's also context that is part of whether something is offensive. So it's a really hard problem."
