Twitch to introduce Sound Bites, stream title emotes, and more features in 2023

Last year, Twitch introduced many new features and updates including the lower payout threshold, Ad Incentive Program, chat highlights, and more. As we step into the new year, Twitch unfolds its plans with the main priority being streamers’ growth. Here are what you can expect from Twitch in 2023.

According to Twitch’s open letter to the community, there were tons of new and exciting features that Twitch is planning to introduce this year. The listed features include:

Twitch is working to create more tools to allow streamers to have more personalized interactions with their community. The platform is now working on developing Twitch-exclusive unique alerts including what would be called Sound Bites. Sound Bites is a first-party sound alerts program that viewers can pay to interact with their favorite streamers on stream.

This feature is not entirely new as streamers have been using sound alerts for a while, but Twitch is working to make its own unique set of alerts.

There will also be an update to Cheering and a new feature called Viewer Milestones, which can help you recognize viewers for hitting certain achievements during your stream. They’re also creating a Q&A (Questions and Answers) tool to allow you to take prompts from the audience with mod tools to filter the content before showing them on stream.

Aside from the usual on-stream interactions, Twitch plans to explore offline interactions with the community. The platform will launch a messaging product that allows you to send messages to followers and subscribers while you’re offline.

One of the simplest yet most exciting additions so far is allowing emotes to be featured in stream titles. This has probably been a long-requested feature as emotes play a big part in Twitch. The site is also launching Pinned Clips, which allows streamers to pin up to 20 clips to their channel. This can help keep your most popular or most exciting clips right in front of your page for better impressions.

On top of that, Twitch is working on a tool to help edit and export clips for vertical, short-form video formats. The site will also work with Twitter to improve the look of clips and livestreams played on feed. To better promote channels, Twitch is also updating the customizable tags to add more depth.

To provide users with deeper channel insights, Twitch will introduce Creator Home, a feature for Affiliates and Partners, that will give you a more personalized and dynamic homebase. This will include relevant tips and recommendations to help grow your channels. Apart from that, Twitch will add more analytic improvements that’ll let you understand your audience better and strategize your content around information such as where your viewers came from and audience retention data.

Twitch plans to launch features that can make sponsorship deals more effective on Twitch. It will have channel skins and clickable branded graphics that streamers can easily place without it being disruptive to the audience experience. Twitch will first test this feature with a few selected streamers.

In the open letter, Twitch also elaborated on how it wants to improve the Ads Incentive Program and take in feedback and requests from the community. It will work on giving streamers more control over ads on their streams. Twitch also mentioned that it is working on Twitch Turbo, a feature that offers perks like ad-free viewing. Twitch will also add tools and updates to Guest Star to make it more efficient.

To find out Twitch’s 2023 plan in more detail, you can go to their Twitch TV blog. You can also catch their Patch Notes of the year livestream on their channel at 12:00 PM PT.