Discord voice chat coming to Xbox

[Steve]

Pretty much all the PC gamers I know use Discord for chat and turn their noses up at using the Xbox app, and for good reason really. The "new" Xbox app sucks. It's slow as shit. It crashes sometimes. It lacks features. Plenty of games have cross-platform play now, but sometimes grouping up in chat with a mix of PC and console players is a pain.

Even though Sony announced a partnership with Discord around a year ago, the Xbox will be getting Discord voice chat soon. You will need to link the Xbox app on your phone to the Discord app, then when that's done, when you're using Discord there will be a new "Join on Xbox" option, enabling you to join chat channels.

On the console it looks like this: -

It's only rolling out to certain Xbox Insider groups at the moment, but it will come to all users eventually; hopefully in the next few weeks.

[Steve]

This is available to everyone now, but the way they've implemented it is kinda poor IMO.

You have to connect your Xbox account to your Discord account, which is a one-time thing. Then to actually join a Discord voice channel on your console, you have to launch the Discord app on your phone, click the option to join it on Xbox, which then launches the Xbox app on your phone, which deals with the connection.

It would be way better if they had a Discord app on the console, or the functionality was fully baked into the OS. Sony have a partnership with Discord, so maybe that prevents MS from offering a Discord app on Xbox. That kind of shit has happened before, for example, when MS first added a Netflix app to the Xbox 360, they signed a deal with Netflix that gave them exclusivity for a year or two, preventing Sony from offering their own downloadable app.

[djdiggla]

Cool but why would you want to do that over just using a party for chat?

[Steve]

18 minutes ago, djdiggla said:

Cool but why would you want to do that over just using a party for chat?

Just cos a lot of PC gamers use Discord for chat, and a bunch of games have cross-play now.

I think it's largely MS's fault for not making something as good as Discord in the first place. The Xbox app on PC is awful, and Game Bar isn't that great either, plus you need to have a Microsoft account and gamertag too.

MS did try and buy Discord with an offer of $12 billion, but they rejected it.

[TBearOne8III]

my son is on a discord group for super smash bros battles. Discord does video chat too. we use it all the time

[djdiggla]

On 9/14/2022 at 11:37 AM, Steve said:

Just cos a lot of PC gamers use Discord for chat, and a bunch of games have cross-play now.

I think it's largely MS's fault for not making something as good as Discord in the first place. The Xbox app on PC is awful, and Game Bar isn't that great either, plus you need to have a Microsoft account and gamertag too.

MS did try and buy Discord with an offer of $12 billion, but they rejected it.

I totally would have taken the money

[Steve]

A new update has been rolled out just now for all Xbox consoles, and it brings some nice improvements to the Discord functionality.

Now, when you open the guide and go to the "Parties & chats" tab, underneath where you start a party is a new "Discord" option. When you click on that, it will show the servers you're a member of, you click on one of those, then you can join a voice chat channel direct from there. No more messing about doing it via a phone, then having to jump back over to the console. It's about as simple as they could have made it now.

They've also added Discord's "Krisp" voice suppression technology, which uses machine learning to filter out background noise, such as keyboard typing, dogs barking etc. You can turn it on and off in the settings, so it's not forced upon you.