Xbox will now let you clip and report audio to clean up Call of Duty lobbies

theverge.com:

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

Xbox is adding reactive voice chat moderation. Rolling out today to Xbox Insiders, the new reporting feature will allow players to capture and submit 60-second audio clips of inappropriate voice chat messages, which will then be reviewed by the Xbox safety team.

In an interview with The Verge, Xbox GM of Trust and Safety Kim Kunes said that voice chat moderation represented the next step in Xbox’s holistic approach to ensuring player safety.

“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.”

This new feature was designed to be as minimally invasive as possible so players can capture and report offending clips without disrupting gameplay. If you hear something and want to report it, you can capture it in the moment, then submit your report later.

Kunes was explicit in that Xbox is not actively listening to nor storing player voice chats.

“Recording is strictly done through the reporting functionality, and it’s only available for moderation purposes,” she said. “So it’s not something that the player can save or share separately from that reporting mechanism to us.”

Clips captured for moderation are also deleted 24 hours after capture. Kunes said Xbox will remind you to submit your report before the deletion. Xbox is also expanding its notification system to inform players on what action Xbox took and why.

Kunes