Microsoft announced the new features included in the latest Xbox update in a blog post on the Xbox website. The Xbox June update is now available, and it improves Party Chat by introducing speech-to-text and text-to-speech features. Along with these enhancements, the update changes the Xbox app, which now displays official posts from games, allows you to reorder groups in the Guide, and makes it easier to review and approve family member requests to play with users on different platforms. In the future, Xbox One users will be able to play next-generation games via Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Xbox Party Chat
Gaming should be welcoming, approachable, and accessible to all. This includes making it simple for gamers to play and communicate with one another. Party chat, which is used by gamers all over the world to communicate with their friends while playing, now supports speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversion. Each of these features can be used to assist gamers who are deaf or hard of hearing and/or who are unable or unwilling to speak.
- Speech-to-Text Transcription: By enabling speech-to-text transcription, gamers can have all words spoken by members of a party converted into text that appears in an adjustable overlay on top of gameplay.
- Text-to-Speech Synthesis: By enabling text-to-speech synthesis, gamers can type into party text chat and have it read aloud to the rest of the party by a synthetic voice (with a choice of several voices per language).
Speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionality can both be enabled in Settings > Ease of Access > Game and chat transcription. When you’re at a party, you can also get to this screen by going to Options > Configure Ease of Access settings.
The Xbox Mobile App
The Xbox app for Android and iOS keeps you in touch with the rest of your gaming community. Gamers can use the app to easily share game clips and screenshots, chat with friends, track their achievements, and even play games from their console via remote play. Throughout this month, you will begin to see official posts from your favorite games. You can view the posts from the app’s homepage and like, share, or comment on them.
Reorder Groups in the Guide
Groups allow you to make lists in the guide for easy access to your favorite games and apps. There is now a new “Move groups” button built right into the guide’s “My games & apps” screen, allowing you to rearrange the order of your groups. To use it, open the guide, then select My games & apps, then Move groups to rearrange your groups.
Family’s Cross-Network Play Requests
The Xbox family settings allow you to control how people interact with your family’s gaming. We will continue to innovate family settings on Xbox in order to be as unique as families are today and to meet their needs. To that end, we’ve made it easier for you to review and approve your children’s requests to play with people on other game platforms and Windows PCs on your console. Children who use Xbox child accounts as part of a family group can now request permission from their parent or caregiver to play games like Minecraft with others who use other gaming services. Parents can approve or decline their children’s requests by using the Xbox Family Settings app for Android or iOS, or by using the console itself.
Xbox Cloud Gaming
In a separate post detailing the E3 exclusive game lineup, Microsoft revealed that in the future, Xbox One users will be able to play next-gen console games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, Redfall, Starfield, and others via Xbox Cloud Gaming (formerly called xCloud). These games are currently available only on the Xbox Series X/Series S and PC.
This is fantastic news for owners of previous-generation Xbox consoles because, while some upcoming games will not officially launch with Xbox One support, they will still be able to play them via cloud gaming. It makes sense because older generation consoles lack the power to run the new upcoming games as intended, but with Xbox Cloud Gaming, they won’t need the extra graphics and processing power, just a stable internet connection. Microsoft has stated that more information will be released soon.
