Voice chat is a popular feature in games, the metaverse, and social media networks but it comes with challenges like harassment and toxic behavior. This post breaks down our keynote at VOICE 22 exploring how Speechly helps solve these issues.
Voice chat has quickly become a popular feature in games, metaverse virtual worlds, and social media networks. Consumers like how it adds to the experience. The creators of these spaces like how it drives higher user loyalty, session frequency, and ARPU. However, there is a downside.
Voice chat can sometimes become a vector for harassment and toxic behavior, and it presents challenges that text moderation solutions cannot adequately address due to latency, inaccuracy, privacy, and the high cost of off-the-shelf speech recognition solutions. That has led to a voice chat moderation gap.
Otto Söderlund, CEO and co-founder of Speechly, addressed this challenge at Voice Summit 2022. He recounted how companies in the gaming industry explained this challenge and asked, “How do we ensure our experiences are safe?”
Söderlund breaks down the technical requirements as speed, privacy, and accuracy. Speed enables the platform to intervene before a situation escalates and even cut off a problematic feed automatically. Accuracy is critical, so you don’t miss incidents (i.e., false negative errors) or intervene when it is unwarranted (i.e., false positive errors) and undermine user loyalty. Privacy is essential from both a regulatory perspective and for users’ peace of mind.
Speechly’s solution meets these requirements directly while also addressing the other challenge many companies face when monitoring voice chat channels – cost. The solution can be deployed on-premise or on device, and savings can be as high as 90% over cloud service provider fees.
Let me know what you think about the voice chat moderation gap and Otto’s presentation. You can DM me or tag me on Twitter @CollinBorns or LinkedIn. Checkout this link to learn more about Speechly’s solution for voice chat moderation.
Gym Class VR is a basketball game that was preparing to launch on Meta Quest after a very successful Beta. Voice chat is an important social element of the game, but the team noticed evidence of toxic behavior emerging. After trying speech recognition from cloud service providers, they quickly learned this was a cost-prohibitive approach and turned to Speechly.
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