Xbox adds Discord voice chat support, bringing a reliable and popular universal chat app to Microsoft’s game consoles, albeit indirectly.
The new integration is now available to everyone in the Xbox Insiders beta program, which offers early access to what Microsoft wants to test before the full launch. If you don’t want to participate in the Xbox beta experience, anyone with an Xbox Series X, S, or Xbox One will be able to chat via Discord when the feature goes live later this year.
Discord is a chat app for everyone who plays multiplayer games, and with good reason. Call quality is excellent and the app is overall much more fun to use than the chat service built into the multiplayer game itself. While we haven’t tried it yet, there are a few steps you need to take for voice chat to work, starting with making sure you have the Xbox app installed on iOS or Android.
The new integration takes a few steps to send your Discord voice chat to your console, but once you have both apps installed, things sound pretty straightforward. Once you have access to the feature (currently via Xbox Insiders), you’ll need to connect your Xbox account to Discord via the Connections menu in Discord’s user settings. Linking the two will also show your game and Discord activity tags if you so choose.
Once the accounts are linked, you need to look for the “Join Xbox” option and transfer the audio to the Xbox account. The Xbox Mobile app will appear automatically and voice chat will be redirected to your console. You can follow the same process for server voice channels, DMs, and group DMs, according to Discord.
While today’s news is all about Xbox, the ubiquitous gaming chat app actually added a bit of integration with PlayStation earlier this year. Unlike the new Xbox option, Discord’s interaction with Sony only allows users to link a PSN account to their Discord profile to show what they’re playing without connecting the chat app directly to the console.
Connecting Discord to Xbox may require a few extra steps, but deeper integration suggests the company is getting closer to Microsoft, which expressed interest in buying the app for $12 billion early last year. Discord eventually pulled out of the conversation, but the two companies seem to be coordinating in new ways more than a year later.