Voice changer spotted in LoL PBE datamine alongside Team Voice Chat

A feature first uncovered in February by dataminers, Team Voice Chat seems to be getting closer by the day to a full release in League of Legends. Through a new round of datamining efforts by long-time creator SkinSpotlights, it appears that Riot Games is now working on an integrated voice-changing tool dubbed “Voice Skins,” potentially incorporating Voicemod technology.

As of now, no news regarding when the feature could release has been made public, with Andrei “Meddler” van Roon, senior vice president at Riot Games, specifically saying in March that the feature was “not going to go live imminently” and that the leaks occurred “before we were ready to talk about it.”

For years now, Team Voice Chat has been both fervently demanded and feared by the League of Legends community. Having first experimented with party voice chat in 2018, Riot Games has remained on the fence about adding such a feature to League of Legends, despite introducing it in another of its games, VALORANT.

Indeed, while voice chat could theoretically bring more coordination to teams and provide more avenues for social interaction, that very benefit also constitutes a major potential issue in a space where anonymity is key and users often face toxicity. In particular, women and queer communities are often targets of harassment, and the introduction of voice chat could increase the risk of those players being targeted.

In a 2025 study examining 120 VALORANT and 28 Overwatch matches, researchers recorded that sexual harassment occurred in roughly one in seven VALORANT games observed. Research from the Anti-Defamation League has likewise found that voice chat is one of the primary locations for harassment in online games. Its 2021 study found that more players reported harassment through voice chat than text chat, while VALORANT was among the games where players reported the most hostile environments.

The issue is not merely anecdotal. Riot's own executive producer, Anna Donlon, previously spoke publicly about experiencing gender-based harassment in VALORANT, telling WIRED that she avoided using voice chat when playing alone. Other female players have similarly described avoiding voice communication because revealing their gender can make them a target.

With Riot now apparently testing Voice Skins alongside Team Voice Chat, the feature could therefore become more than a cosmetic addition. If implemented properly, voice modification could give players greater control over how they are perceived in a voice channel—something that may be particularly valuable in a game where Riot itself has acknowledged the potential for voice chat to create negative experiences.

For now, Riot has yet to provide a release date for Team Voice Chat, and the developer previously warned that the feature would require extensive testing and iteration before reaching live servers. However, with development seemingly progressing on the PBE, there is one particularly interesting possibility for its eventual release: League Next.

The massive League of Legends update is scheduled for 2027, with Riot set to reveal more concrete details during Worlds 2026. While there is currently no indication that Team Voice Chat will launch alongside League Next, the timing could make sense given the scale of the update and the continued development of the feature. For now, however, this remains speculation, and players will have to wait for Riot's next official update on Team Voice later this year.