Speech-To-Text Feature For Xbox Party Chat Enters Xbox Insiders Rings In Recent Update

When regarding the future of accessibility for avid video game players of all realms, Microsoft continues to lead the initiative for users to find an avenue that best suits them when playing. Namely, the Xbox Adaptive Controller continues to awe owners thanks to the cost-efficient pricing and malleable controller mapping for each preference. Leading into the next-generation, Microsoft pledged to continue this effort.

Additionally, Microsoft has dabbled with other ways to assist players with disabilities. In a statement back in February, the Xbox company established new guidelines that put the betterment of players unable to perform with a regular gamepad or face a certain deficiency. “Once all of the updated Xbox Accessibility Guidelines were ready to go, the team realized that it could take further steps to ensure that developers have a way to find out whether or not their games were actually reaching the level of accessibility they targeted.”

In an announcement from Microsoft back in early May, it was revealed that speech-to-text is being tested via an update for Xbox Insider Rings. Of course, players overall could benefit from the feature, but this addition could greatly enforce a better experience for those that need the extra help.

Xbox Party Chat, used by tens of millions of gamers for voice & text chat, will now support transcribing speech into text and synthesis of speech from text. By enabling speech-to-text transcription, you can have all words spoken by the people in the party converted into text that will be displayed in an adjustable overlay on top of gameplay. 

By enabling text-to-speech synthesis, you 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). 

Either one of these features (or both working together) can be used to help gamers who are deaf or hard of hearing and/or cannot or choose not to speak to participate in Xbox Party Chat without special accommodation from others in the party. They are also generally useful for detecting microphone problems or distinguishing game audio from people in the party talking!

Scott Weber, Xbox Program Manager

The tool, to reiterate, is currently available for Xbox Insider Rings and is still being tested. Even more, this feature is told to be utilized exclusively for Xbox Party Chat. But perhaps this feature will also extend to the PC version as well when officially released for the greater population later down the line.

Xbox Party Chat just recently received a greater update as it was revealed that the feature will be a free-to-play service alongside online titles that do not cost a dime to install. You can read the full report by heading here.

Are you interested to try the new speech-to-text feature?

Source: Xbox Wire