A big weekend ahead for Xbox Live members: more people will receive preview access to the new Xbox One experience and a host of gaming features will roll out to the Xbox Beta App on Windows 10.
Our engineering team is working hard on the new Xbox One experience, the fastest and most social interface we’ve ever created. As we’ve been doing for almost two years, we’re sharing early builds with our fans, so that they can try out and provide input on new features. We welcomed a limited group of preview members into an early peek at the reimagined Xbox One a few weeks ago. This weekend, we’ll be inviting in more. If you’ve enrolled to receive the new Xbox One experience preview, keep an eye out for the build on your console. For fans already in the new Xbox One experience preview, thank you for all your feedback. Keep it coming! For those who have asked about Cortana, our plan is to add Cortana to the Xbox One experience preview later this year. From there, we’ll ensure that the experience is tuned for gamers before we officially launch Cortana in 2016.
Read and reply to messages directly from notifications
Also this weekend, we’re excited to add the following features to the Xbox Beta App for Windows 10:
- Party text chat – Earlier this week, we introduced party text chat as another way to connect with your friends in the latest build of the New Xbox One Experience Preview. Starting today, party text chat is available for Xbox Beta app members, joining voice chat as another way for gamers to communicate with friends.
- Read and reply to messages directly from notifications – No need to click through to read and reply to messages anymore. Now, you can quickly reply directly to the message inline. (See above)
- Activity alert notifications – You’ll get real-time notifications when someone else in the Xbox Live community adds you as a friend or likes, shares, or comments on your content. We designed these notifications to help you engage more deeply and easily with the community and made them easy to manage in Settings.
- Activity feed sharing – In the top right corner of your activity feed, you’ll now see a “share” icon. Click on the icon to display your recent shareable activity, such as achievements earned, game clips recorded and screenshots taken. From here, you can easily select the content you want to share.
Thanks for all the great feedback and helping make Xbox gaming better.