Xbox June update has text-to-speech party chat accessibility options and more

The June update for Xbox has landed heralding new features and changes to both Microsoft's game consoles and Xbox app on mobile platforms.

Today's release brings speech-to-text and text-to-speech transcription support for party chat on Xbox consoles. With speech-to-text, anything spoken while in a party can now be converted to text which appears as an adjustable overlay on top of gameplay, while text-to-speech has text chat being read aloud by a synthetic voice (with multiple voices available) for others in the party.

Both functions can be found in Settings > Ease of Access > Game and Chat transcription page. Options > Configure Ease of Access settings can also be used to access it from inside of a party chat.

Elsewhere, the guide has been updated to allow customizing the order of custom game groups. In the My games & apps screen now exists a 'Move groups' button alongside the 'Create a new group' button for easy sorting.

Cross-network play requests — involving games like Minecraft that can be played with Windows 10 and Switch players — made by Xbox child accounts in a family group can now be handled by parents or guardians via the Xbox Family Settings mobile app or from an Xbox console. Speaking of mobile, Microsoft is also rolling out improvements to the Android and iOS Xbox apps that will let users see official social posts from games, while offering like, share, and commenting capabilities.

As for known issues in this update, not much has changed since last month except a single new problem that has surfaced. Microsoft says it has received reports regarding controllers not responding when returning to a game using Quick Resume and suggests restarting the game to resolve it. The update is available now, and users can trigger it to happen right away or wait until it completes automatically.