We strive to make Xbox the most inclusive gaming platform on the planet, and a key part of this journey is introducing more accessible experiences for our players.
Although we already offer game transcription for converting in-game player speech to text and reading chat text that you type to other players aloud, we knew there were opportunities to improve.
That’s why we’re excited to share a new feature available to Insiders today! 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!
How to turn Party Chat Speech Transcript and Synthesis On
Both speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionality can be enabled in Settings under Ease of Access > Game and chat transcription. When in a party, you can also access this settings page under Options > Configure Ease of Access settings.
Learn more about all the accessibility options the Xbox offers at our accessibility page.
We Appreciate You!
As always, thank you so much for your participation in the Xbox Insider Program and helping us make gaming more accessible! When everyone plays, we all win.
Stay up to date on other changes we’re making here on the Xbox Insider Blog, the r/XboxInsiders subreddit, and @XboxInsider on Twitter.