Rectify Gaming

In-game chat transcription coming to Xbox and Windows 10


Posted on March 16, 2017 by Philip

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Microsoft has continually improved its products in recent years to be as accessible by both typical and impaired users as possible.  The next effort coming to the Microsoft ecosystem is game chat transcription, and the first game to support it is Halo Wars 2.
Some online games nowadays have in-built text chat or voice chat systems, but rarely do they work together past voice chatters being able to read the text chat and the text chat respond to what’s said.  The latest accessibility move is aimed at letting visually and hearing impaired players better interact with a game and fellow players.  Here’s how the blog post puts the latest feature:

“Speech-to-text provides the ability to convert all players’ voice communications in the game chat into text, so the player using this feature can read the text on their screen in real-time.  Text-to-speech provides the ability for players using this feature to have their typed text spoken aloud to other players in the game.”

Speech-to-text and text-to-speech are not new technologies by any stretch of the imagination, but using them as communication between players is definitely interesting and useful.  While this feature is now able to be implemented by developers, meaning it’s not currently in many games right now, support is built right into the latest Xbox Play Anywhere launch, Halo Wars 2.  The blog post gives the steps to enable the feature, so if you’re interesting in trying it out or think you can benefit from it, here’s how to do it on Xbox.

  1. Go to Settings > All settings > Ease of Access > Game Chat Transcription.
  2. To transcribe other players’ voices into text, select Speech-to-text.
  3. To have your chat text read aloud to other players, select Text-to-speech.
  4. To choose the voice that other players will hear when your chat text is read aloud, select one of the available voices in the Text-to-speech voice menu.

And here’s how to enable it on your Windows 10 PC:

  1. Open the Xbox app and go to Settings > General > Game chat transcription.
  2. To transcribe other players’ voices into text, select Speech-to-text.
  3. To have your chat text read aloud to other players, select Text-to-speech.
  4. To choose the voice that other players will hear when your chat text is read aloud, select one of the available voices in the Text-to-speech voice menu.

The feature will hopefully be implemented in more games as the year progresses, because inclusive gaming is a huge initiative, especially for a company like Microsoft, and seeing their efforts succeed will likely influence other games companies and improve the whole of gaming for all players. If any new games that support this feature arrive, or any new features are added, we’ll keep you updated.  So for the latest, be sure to stay tuned to Rectify Gaming.
Source: MSDN Accessibility Blog

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