Microsoft has just dropped the June update for Xbox Series X, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S. This month’s update includes speech to text and text to speed features for Party Chat, improved parental control for kids accounts, official posts in the Xbox app, and more.

Two new accessibility features — speech-to-text transcription and text-to-speech synthesis — are the main highlights of the update. Both features were available to Xbox Insiders since May, but now they’re finally graduating to the stable channel. As the name suggests, speech-to-text transcription converts spoken words into text and displays them on an adjustable overlay. Meanwhile, with text-to-speech synthesis, a synthetic voice will read out loud text chats from your friends in Party Chat. Both these features can be found under Ease of Access > Game and chat transcription. You can also access them when you're in a Party Chat by navigating Options > Configure Ease of Access settings.

  • 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).

Xbox Game and chat transcription screen

The new update also adds a new “Move groups” button in the Xbox Guide, which allows you to customize the order of your groups. Elsewhere, the update also brings improved parental control over kids' accounts. Xbox child accounts can now ask for their parent’s permission to play with people on other game platforms and devices. Parents can approve or deny these requests using the Xbox Family Settings app or straight from the console itself.

Xbox app official posts

Finally, the Xbox app for Android and iOS will soon start showing official posts from game publishers and Xbox. As you can see in the screenshots above, posts will be shown in Instagram Story-like format and will appear in a horizontally scrolling carousel on the homepage. They will also have the option to like, share and comment.

Xbox Developer: Microsoft Corporation
Price: Free
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