June Xbox Update: Party Chat Accessibility, Xbox App Official Posts, and More

Team Xbox continues to listen to your feedback and is focused on building experiences with you at the center. This month, we’re excited to announce a few more updates as we continue to refine the experience and add brand new features. Our latest update includes party chat with speech-to-text and text-to-speech, official posts from your favorite games in the Xbox mobile app, the ability to reorder groups in the guide, and more.

Party Chat: Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech

At Team Xbox, we believe gaming should be inclusive, approachable, and accessible to everyone. That includes making it easy for gamers to play and communicate together. Party chat, used by gamers around the world to talk to their friends while playing, now supports converting speech into text and text into speech. Each of these features can be used to help gamers who are deaf or hard of hearing and/or cannot or choose not to speak.

• Speech-to-Text: By enabling speech-to-text transcription, gamers can have all words spoken by the people in a party converted into text that’s displayed in an adjustable overlay on top of gameplay. 
• Text-to-Speech: By enabling text-to-speech synthesis, gamers can type into party text chat and have that read by a synthetic voice to the rest of the people in the party (with a choice of several voices per language). 

Both speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionality can be enabled in Settings under Ease of Access > Game and chat transcription. When in a party, you can also access this screen under Options > Configure Ease of Access settings.

Official Posts in the Xbox Mobile App

The Xbox app on Android and iOS keeps you connected to your gaming community. With the app, gamers can easily share their game clips and screenshots, chat with their friends, track their achievements, and even play games from their console with remote play. Over the course of this month, you will start to be able to see official posts from your favorite games.  The posts are viewable from the app homepage and you can like, share, or comment on them. Stay tuned for more updates to the Xbox mobile app in the near future. 

Reorder Groups in the Guide

Groups let you create lists in the guide for quick access to your favorite games and apps. Now there’s a new “Move groups” button built right into the “My games & apps” screen in the guide, letting you customize the order of your groups. To use it, open the guide, select My games & apps, and then select Move groups to rearrange your groups.

Review and Approve Your Family’s Cross Network Play Requests

Family settings on Xbox empowers you to decide how people interact with your family’s gaming. We continue to innovate family settings on Xbox to be as unique as families are today and support their needs. To that end, we’ve made it easier on your console to review and approve your kids’ requests to play with people on other game platforms and Windows PCs. Kids who use Xbox child accounts as part of a family group can now ask for their parent or caregiver’s approval to play games like Minecraft with others who play on other gaming services. Parents can approve or decline their kids’ request using the Xbox Family Settings app on Android or iOS or right from the console.

Help Shape the Future of Xbox

Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for future updates and all the latest and greatest Xbox related news. For support related to Xbox updates, visit support.xbox.com.  If you’d like to help create the future of Xbox and get access to early features, download the Xbox Insider Hub on your Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, or Windows 10 PC today. Let us know what you think – we’re always listening!

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