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In a post on Xbox Wire, Xbox Insider team lead Bradley Rossetti said that the Xbox One’s dashboard is set to change in order to deliver a new ‘easy and seamless experience for you to navigate your console.’ And Cortana’s getting cut.
A handful of Xbox Insiders in the Alpha and Alpha Skip Ahead rings will soon be able to test the experimental Home design, which swaps Twists for independent buttons that launch games at the top of Home, and gives extra room to recently played games. This aims to intuitively get players into ‘your gaming experiences faster and keeping more of your content front and center’, be it the Xbox Game Pass, the Xbox Community, Mixer, or the Microsoft Store.
Secondly, voice commands will receive a major change as Rossetti explains that the Home redesign is ‘moving away from on-console experiences to cloud-based assistant experiences.’ Once the update is live, players will no longer be able to talk to Cortana through the headset. Xbox Skill does still allow contacting of Cortana on the Cortana app on iOS, Android, and Windows, as well as Alexa-enabled devices. Also, the Harmon Kardon Invoke speaker will work to ‘power your Xbox One, adjust volume, launch games and apps, capture screenshots, and more’ while the dictation for Xbox One’s virtual keyboard is temporarily disabled.
Xbox explains that the changes are informed by user feedback, but some have raised concerns about the loss of Cortana in favour of external voice command services. This may affect not only the accessibility of the console interface, which has been prioritised by Microsoft, but also the games that use speech to text features such as Gears 5. Once testing is complete and feedback is collected from the select Xbox Insiders, this update will roll out to all users in autumn.
