Xbox announced that starting this week, players will be able to capture and report inappropriate in-game voice chats with its newest feature added to Xbox Insiders—reactive voice recording.
For years in-game chat has been one of the most toxic parts of gaming, from montages and YouTube videos of streamers losing it publicly to young children getting away with swearing while mom and dad aren’t watching. While some cases are as innocent as they can be, some hateful vitriol also regularly gets thrown around using the game’s in-game voice chat features, as games like Call of Duty are best known for. Xbox has decided to try to stop this unnecessary chatter by adding a new feature to Xbox Insiders—reactive voice recording.
How it works is that, basically, you make a clip using the Xbox capture feature, which identifies any communications that violate Xbox’s Community Standards policy, then later on, you can submit that clip and write a short description of what happened, which Xbox will look over and make determinations on for bans and so on. This is a huge win for the safety of the platform, not only for those who get degraded and harassed but also for younger audiences that get damaging words thrown their way on the regular.
In an interview with The Verge, Xbox GM of Trust and Safety Kim Kunes discussed this new feature and how to tackle voice chat moderation as a whole. “If a player experiences something in our community that they don’t like and they want to report that to us, they have a variety of different options for doing that,” Kunes said. “We do moderation proactively on text, on images, and videos, and launching reactive voice moderation is about that audio portion of it.”
Luckily, after some of the trouble Xbox got for keeping children’s information via the FTC, Kunes also made it clear that this won’t be a new way to spy on voice chats or for players to spread these negative interactions, as “recording is strictly done through the reporting functionality, and it’s only available for moderation purposes,” and it’s “not something that the player can save or share separately from that reporting mechanism to us.”
This great new tool is rolling out to English-speaking countries, like the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, with more to come “over the coming months” as the feature gets tested a bit more. With Sony implementing the feature on PlayStation a couple of years ago and games like Overwatch 2 and Valorant already having similar in-game features, the safety of players is only getting stronger.
