One of the main selling points for the Xbox One's Kinect peripheral is the ability to use voice commands for the console. Players can turn on their Xbox, boot up apps and share content all with simple phrases, no controller required.
That being said, most Xbox One users don't own a Kinect. When Microsoft stopped requiring the camera add-on to come bundled with every Xbox One, prices dropped and millions of gamers joined the Xbox One community. The downside is that those non-Kinect adopters couldn't take full advantage of what their console offered, specifically the voice commands.
That's finally changing now, as Microsoft is enabling Xbox One voice commands to be carried out by headset. The company will also be completely retooling the system's voice command system to use Cortana, Microsoft's Siri equivalent named for the iconic Halo character.
Starting today for preview members and coming soon to all users, players will be able to use any headset to take advantage of Cortana-enabled voice commands that will be familiar to users of the features on Windows 10. No longer will players need to precede every voice command with "Xbox" and use a specific phrase. Instead, players can use more natural language, such as "Hey Cortana, let's play Gears of War."
It's a big change that has been a long time coming, but it's not the only new feature coming in the update. The Xbox One game library is being retooled to be vertical rather than horizontal, with icons for all the games in a given user's library now being much larger.
The Xbox app on Windows 10, and the Xbox and Windows 10 storefronts, are also seeing a number of improvements. Popular PC games like League of Legends will now be getting their own game hubs on the Xbox app, and players will soon be able to edit and upload game clips to Xbox Live using any video editor. Players will also now be able to record game footage at a 60 fps "very high" setting.
These changes will be coming to preview members in the United States, UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain first, with the updates rolling out to all users in the near future. You can read more about all the upcoming features to Xbox One and the Xbox app over on Major Nelson's official Xbox blog.
