Voice chat on Xbox consoles is about to get real.
Sure, you’ve been able to voice chat on Xbox for almost 20 years, but now you can do it through the king of gaming voice chat apps, Discord. Xbox rolled out a big November software update on Wednesday that included the ability to link a Discord account to an Xbox console (such as a Series X) and voice chat across the gaming universe. By that, I mean across Xbox, PC, and mobile because PlayStation doesn’t have Discord voice chat…yet.
Microsoft actually started gradually rolling out Discord on Xbox earlier this summer, but now it’s available to everyone on the platform.
To take advantage of this new feature, you’ll have to go through a short process to link your Discord and Xbox accounts together. There’s a handy guide on the Xbox website for this, but it mostly amounts to going to the settings menu on either an Xbox console or a Discord app, and then logging into the other account from there.
Once you’ve done that, hit the Xbox button on your console, scroll over to Parties & Chats, then select Discord to see a list of available voice channels to join, along with previews of which friends are in those channels already. If you’re on a next-gen Xbox Series console, there’s an option to automatically suppress background noise, too.
This is useful because more and more online games support cross-platform play, usually between one console and PC, and this can make voice chatting unnecessarily cumbersome. For example, I have a Fortnite crew that’s heavily on PC, so if I (a console guy) want to play with them, I have to use Discord on my phone or laptop where I can’t hear game audio. With Discord on Xbox (and eventually PlayStation), people like me won’t have to choose between hearing the game and hearing our friends anymore.
That’s gaming bliss, folks.
