Published on July 13th, 2023 | by Andrew Bistak
Xbox Launches Reactive Voice Reporting Feature for In-Game Chat
Today, Xbox announced that, starting this week, it’s releasing a new platform-wide, reactive voice reporting feature to Xbox Insiders, allowing players to capture and report inappropriate in-game voice chats. As the next step in Xbox’s safety innovation, voice reporting – specifically for in-game chat – was targeted as this is an area where players have the highest opportunity to interact with players outside their friend network. Xbox’s player reporting now covers all content including text, image, video and voice.
The feature, part of Xbox’s larger moderation suite, equips Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One players with the ability to capture a 60-second video clip of an in-game voice incident that they believe violates our Community Standards and submit it as evidence to our Xbox Safety Team for review, who will evaluate the user report and determine if a policy violation took place. We’ve also made updates to our notification features so the player that submitted the report will get a notification about whether or not Xbox took action on the report submitted.
The process follows a ‘capture now, report later’ scenario, meaning players can initiate a report while in a game, capture the audio containing the speech in question, return to their game, minimizing disruption to play. The clip lives on player’s console for 24 online hours, giving them the flexibility to either submit immediately or wait until they’re ready. Xbox will also send a reminder to report if players haven’t completed one within the 24 online hour period. If they decide not to report, the clip will be erased from consoles automatically.
This feature was built after much research and feedback from the player community, including Xbox Ambassadors. It will go out first to the Xbox Insiders program before becoming widely available to the console player base in English-language speaking markets (US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand). Xbox is actively exploring and testing additional languages.
Xbox knows that each player has an important role to play in its thriving and growing community, and is calling for players to step up for one another, be active allies, and report any experiences of toxicity.