Discord adds text chat to voice channels

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Discord, everyone’s go-to voice-and-text communication service, revealed it’s adding a new feature: Text chat specifically for voice channels. It functions almost identically to text chat in other video calling features.

Up to now, if you wanted to share something with others in voice chat, or if you wanted to listen in on a voice chat but speak in text form, you needed to use a text channel for that purpose. Now the voice channels will have their own text space instead. If you’ve used Zoom or Google Meet, this will be familiar.

In order to access a voice channel’s text chat, you’ll click the chat bubble icon next to the voice channel’s name. Users will be able to access it even if they’re not in the voice chat. When you’re in the voice channel, you can also use a button in the top right of the screen.

Discord is also adding moderation features, in case server owners need to control who speaks in text chat. All Discord servers will have the text-in-voice feature by June 15, and some servers can opt-in to the feature in the settings, starting today.

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