Next-gen Xbox gains Siri-like voice capabilities

Care of the ever-popular Verge, we now know that the next-generation Xbox will have “Siri-like” capabilities.

“Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox plans” say that the new Xbox, code-named Durango (I like the way you die, boy) will activate when words like “Xbox on” are spoken, will have text-to-speech conversion and support a natural tone of voice.

The Xbox, in its current state, even with Kinect voice, doesn’t use  natural voice in any of its commands. The new Siri-like voice feature will apparently let users speak phrases such as “what are my friends playing” to pull up the online friends list. It may even go as far as to use the Kinect’s pretty powerful sensor to suggest appropriate multiplayer games based on amount of players it scans in the room.

Everything changes

And then there’s the topic of video and VoIP. The next-gen Xbox will allow players to control media playback with voice alone, even going as far as letting the user speak to select films. And as The Verge suggests, having speech to text will certainly make its way into Skype which is widely expected to make its debut on the Xbox fairly soon. Whatever happens, E3 is the place to be and is the venue that Microsoft plans to release details surrounding its next-gen gaming console. Roll on June.