A few hours ago, Activision announced the next step in its fight to combat online toxicity in the Call of Duty franchise with the North American rollout of an AI-powered real-time voice chat moderation tool.
The new system is based on ToxMod, a technology made by Modulate. Here's how it works, according to the description available on the official website:
First, ToxMod triages voice chat data to determine which conversations warrant investigation and analysis.
- Triaging is a crucial component of ToxMod’s efficiency and accuracy, flagging the most pertinent conversations for toxicity analysis and removing silence or unrelated background noise.
- Unlike text moderation, processing voice data is labor intensive and often cost prohibitive, necessitating accurate and reliable filtering.
Second, ToxMod analyzes the tone, context, and perceived intention of those filtered conversations using its advanced machine learning processes.
- ToxMod’s powerful toxicity analysis assesses the tone, timbre, emotion, and context of a conversation to determine the type and severity of toxic behavior.
- ToxMod is the only voice moderation tool built on advanced machine learning models that go beyond keyword matching to provide true understanding of each instance of toxicity.
- ToxMod’s machine learning technology can understand emotion and nuance cues to help differentiate between friendly banter and genuine bad behavior.
Third, ToxMod escalates the voice chats deemed most toxic, and empowers moderators to efficiently take actions to mitigate bad behavior and build healthier communities.
- ToxMod’s web console provides actionable, easy-to-understand information and context for each instance of toxic behavior.
- Moderators and community teams can work more efficiently, allowing even small teams to manage and monitor millions of simultaneous chats.
Activision has already rolled out a beta release of ToxMod in North America across Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone. The global release (except for Asia) will occur with the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on November 10th. For now, English is the only supported language, with others coming in the future.
This new anti-toxicity system will add to the existing text-based filtering of the games' text chat available in fourteen languages, and of course, there's still the in-game player reporting system.
In other Call of Duty news, Season 05 Reloaded is out now, adding three operators (including Tomb Raider's Lara Croft), new weapons, and much more. Read the entire patch notes here.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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