How AI-assisted voice moderation can help combat toxicity

Why Modulate’s voice-native moderation tool ToxMod is more beneficial than old forms of grief reporting [View this email in your browser]( You have been sent a sponsored message via GamesIndustry.biz, in association with Modulate Modulate: how AI-assisted voice moderation tools can help combat toxicity Why Modulate’s voice-native moderation tool ToxMod is more beneficial than old forms of grief reporting Voice moderation is a sensitive issue. Players expect privacy, but long gone are the halcyon days of early, friendly online gaming. Today, when players interact with strangers in online games it can all too often lead to toxic behaviour. Striking the balance between player privacy and safety for online communities is the challenge facing games studios today. Boston-based start-up Modulate wants to help game companies clean up toxic behaviour in their games with machine learning-based tools that promise to empower moderators and protect players. Modulate CEO Mike Pappas told GamesIndustry.biz why its voice-native moderation tool ToxMod is more beneficial than old forms of grief reporting, why studios should build effective codes of conduct amid changing online safety regulations and how their technology and guidance is helping to make online communities safer. ToxMod: machine-assisted proactive reporting vs user-generated reporting User-initiated incident reports for bad behaviour have been standard for many years – just this summer, [Xbox rolled out new voice reporting features for its platforms.]( But Pappas says game studios cannot rely on this method alone. “User reports are a really important part of the overall trust and safety strategy. You have to give your users ownership,” he says. But you can’t just rely on that channel. A lot of users have had bad experiences with user reporting systems in the past, where they feel like their reports go into a black box, that they don’t have the tools to submit, and they don’t know if anything they reported is actually getting addressed.” Submitting a report often takes players out of the action when playing a game or chatting in a social group. And this plays a part in Modulate’s assertion that user reports only account for anywhere from 10 to 30% of the bad behaviour in studios’ games. This is what the AI-assisted ToxMod, Modulate’s voice-native and comprehensive moderation tool, aims to improve. “There’s a lot of tools out there to just transcribe audio, but you lose so much valuable nuance from what’s actually being said. We’re not only looking at things like tone and emotion, but we can even look at behavioural characteristics,” says Pappas. “So, if you join a group of people, say one thing and then everyone goes shocked silent for a second, that’s a warning sign. We can look at all of those kinds of indications.” “Users still can report, but especially for the really harmful stuff, like child grooming or violent radicalisation, you often have a target that is not aware of what’s happening and not able to report it. So it was really important for us to be able to proactively bring those things to a studio’s attention.” [To read the full article, click here]( [Facebook icon]( [Twitter icon]( [LinkedIn icon]( Copyright (C) 2023 ReedPop. All rights reserved. You got this email because you signed up to an account on GamesIndustry.biz and agreed to receive promotional emails from our partners. Our mailing address is: ReedPop 1-6 Grand ParadeBrighton, East Sussex BN2 9QB United Kingdom [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe]( [Privacy Policy]( | [Cookie Policy](