Xbox Comes After Toxic Gamers With Recorded Voice Chats

A new feature is coming to Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X consoles that aims to tackle toxicity in voice chats. If you're not hearing someone's music or TV blaring through voice chat there's a good chance you're hearing someone insult your mother. Toxicity in online gaming is well documented and no secret. That said, Xbox is targeting "inappropriate verbal behavior" with a new feature that will allow Xbox gamers to voice record other users and report the contents of this recoding to Xbox itself. 

"Players come to Xbox to build friendships, be competitive, and to experience incredible games – and they expect to be treated fairly, for interactions to be free of hate or harassment," writes Xbox of the new initiative. "Our investments in safety have helped players feel safer across text, video, and image – and our new voice reporting experience is the latest addition to our robust suite of family and online safety features."

To this end, this week Xbox is rolling out a platform-wide voice reporting feature to Alpha and Alpha Skip-Ahead Xbox Insiders that will allow players the option to capture and report inappropriate in-game voice chats. What exactly classifies as "inappropriate" Xbox doesn't outline. 

How it works is Xbox users will be able to capture a 60-second video clip of an in-game voice incident. From here, the the incident will be submitted to the Xbox Safety Team for review. According to Xbox, the feature is supported and works across 1000s of games that offer multiplayer voice chat, including Xbox 360 backward compatible games.

Xbox notes that only players can initiate the voice capture feature. Further, Xbox will not be saving or uploading voice clips without you permitting the process. To this end, clips will not appear in your recent captures nor can they be downloaded, modified, or shared. In fact, after 24 hours passes, Xbox will issue a reminder that the clip can be submitted if it hasn't been. If the user declines at this point to submit the clip, it will be deleted. As for what Xbox will do to users found violating its "Community Standards" policy through one of these clips, we don't know. It provides no outline for this either. 

At the moment of publishing, there's no word of when this feature will roll out to the wider public. Typically, at least several months past between the Alpha stage and the final release of features, but there's no guaranteed timeline. That said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think. Is this the right move by Xbox?