Silicon Valley Company's Tool Filters Hate Speech During Gaming

SILICON VALLEY, CA — In response to gamers’ concerns regarding toxicity and the use of hate speech during voice chat, Silicon Valley-based Intel announced a tool that would use artificial intelligence to give users the choice to “detect and redact” audio.

The tool, called “Bleep,” offers users sliders corresponding to categories of speech that they could choose to hear or not hear. For example, next to “misogyny,” a user could toggle between “none,” “some,” “most” or “all.” Other categories included the “n-word,” “racism and xenophobia,” “sexually explicit language” and “white nationalism.”

Intel officials presented Bleep during the GDC Showcase last month and the company hopes to release it this year, but the tool only caught the public’s attention after screenshots showing the sliders went viral and became the source of jokes.

One person tweeted: “computer, today i feel like being a little bit misogynistic.” On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece that began: “Cancel culture has a vaccine. Its name is Bleep.”

“While we recognize that solutions like Bleep don’t erase the problem, we believe it’s a step in the right direction, giving gamers a tool to control their experience,” said Roger Chandler, Intel's Vice President and General Manager of Visual Computing Software, during the presentation.

Kim Pallister, general manager of Intel’s gaming solutions team, told Polygon last week that some of the reaction wasn’t based on what is actually in the app, but that the goal of Bleep is to “give users control and choice to see what works, and adapt accordingly.”

Watch the presentation below: