The Xbox One OS may soon integrate with digital assistants other than Cortana, Windows Central has learned yesterday. In the image below, you can see a new “Digital Assistants” section that will reportedly go live in future preview builds right in the Xbox One settings. The new setting pretty much puts Cortana, Alexa and Google Assistant on the same level, which is quite interesting.
After enabling digital assistants in the Xbox One OS, Microsoft will apparently invite Xbox One owners to open set up the integration within Alexa and Google Assistant. It’s still not clear what features will be supported, but it would be pretty cool to be able to use these digital assistants to turn your Xbox on and off and use other voice commands.
Cortana support is currently quite limited on the Xbox One, and the implementation has often been criticised as being inferior in comparison to the original Kinect voice commands that shipped with the console back in 2013. Microsoft revealed last week that Cortana had just 150 million users across all platforms, and opening the Xbox One OS to other digital assistants is good news for consumers who use them.
With E3 2018 being just around the corner, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft discusses this new integration during its upcoming press briefing, though the company may prefer to keep the spotlight on games. Anyway, this is something that should ship first to Xbox Insiders, just like the redesigned Xbox Live avatars that were announced last year.
