Microsoft are to testing a new game chat transcription feature which will taken your spoken word and translate it into on screen text. It will also preform the reverse action and take typed text and convert it in to an audio format.
The new accessibility features will be useful for the deaf or visually impaired, but can be used by those not wishing to listen to ‘bants’ whilst gaming and would rather on screen chatter.
Game Chat Transcription will initially be available today for Halo Wars 2 on both Xbox One and PC, and Microsoft aim to roll out the feature over more titles in the future.
How to activate this feature:
- Go to Settings > All settings > Ease of Access > Game Chat Transcription.
- To transcribe other players’ voices into text, select Speech-to-text.
- To have your chat text read aloud to other players, select Text-to-speech.
- To choose the voice that other players will hear when your chat text is read aloud, select one of the available voices in the Text-to-speech voice menu.
Source: Microsoft
Tony Cawley
Excellent, now the snoopers can keep an even closer eye on everything everyone says, ever.
MrYd
And when it goes horribly wrong and thinks you’ve said something amazingly offensive to a deaf person?
It may just be me that has trouble getting anything to recognise my voice with any degree of success though. I’ve tried it on the PS4, to try and save time hunting things down in the library, and failed about 75% of the time. I’ve tried it on my phone, and it usually ends badly with Android thinking I asked it to search for clown porn, or something equally horrific.
How is it going to get anything remotely accurate when you’re not very carefully speaking because someone’s trying to shoot your face off?