Microsoft starts testing Xbox Party Chat Speech transcription and Synthesis with Xbox Insiders

Xbox Party Chat, the default communication platform that Xbox gamers use for voice and text chat will soon support transcribing speech into text and synthesis of speech from text. The accessibility features are currently being tested with Xbox Insiders, and they also support multiple languages.

With the new Speech Transcript feature, Xbox consoles will transcribe other player’s voices into text when gamers are in a party chat session. With text-to-speech synthesis, gamers will be able to type into Party chat and have the text ready by a synthetic voice to other players in the party.

For Xbox Insiders interested in trying these new accessibility features, they can be found in Settings under Ease of Access > Game and chat transcription.

Microsoft hopes that Party Chat Speech Transcript and Synthesis will help gamers who are deaf or hard of hearing and/or cannot or choose not to speak to participate in Xbox Party Chat. After Microsoft dropped the Xbox Live Gold requirement for Xbox Party chat last month, the company said today that “tens of millions of gamers” now use Xbox Party Chat for voice & text chat.