Xbox" accessibility for everyone, including those with speech and hearing difficulties, has gained new improvements. Microsoft announced today that Xbox Party Chat has added support for speech-to-text transcription and text-to-speech synthesis for Insiders.
Party Chat was introduced a couple of years ago to Xbox One in order to let gamers communicate with other players on the platform using text in addition to voice chat. With the speech-to-text feature, everything you say in the party will be transcribed and the resulting text will show up in an overlay while you"re playing a game. Text-to-speech, on the other hand, lets your text be read out loud to others in the party by a synthetic voice. You can even choose multiple voices for every supported language.
To get started with the new accessibility features, you can simply head over to the Settings menu and then choose "Ease of Access". From there, you can click on Game and then select chat transcription. Alternatively, when you"re in a party, you can just click on options to open the settings and then choose "Configure ease of access."
Speech transcription and text-to-speech capabilities were rolled out to Xbox One (along with Windows 10) in 2017 for some games. Their addition to Party Chat is a welcome development for those using the communication feature during a party.