The new support is currently only available for Xbox Insiders for testing. It expands on the Party Chat feature Microsoft launched back in 2017. Party Chat gives gamers on Xbox consoles the ability to communicate with other players through text and voice. By adding text-to-speech, everything written in the Party Chat will be converted to speech, helping vision impaired users. As for speech-to-text, everything said through voice in the chat will be converted into text to help hearing impaired users. In a blog post, the Xbox team explains the benefits of the new support: “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!”
Setting it Up
Setting up text-to-speech and speech-to-text is easy. Users can visit the Settings menu on their Xbox consoles and select “Ease of Access”. In the Game option choose “chat transcription”. Another method is to click the options within the Chat Party. If you’re an Xbox Insider, let us know how the new transcription features work in Chat Party. Tip of the day: To prevent attackers from capturing your password, Secure Sign-in asks the user to perform a physical action that activates the sign-in screen. In some cases, this is a dedicated “Windows Security” button, but the most common case in Windows 10 is the Ctrl+Alt Del hotkey. In our tutorial, we show you how to activate this feature.
