Cortana on Xbox One Will Work Through Kinect and Headsets

Today, Microsoft announced that the upcoming Summer updates will finally be bringing Cortana, their extremely popular voice enabled digital assistance from Windows 10 and Windows Phone, will be coming to Xbox One as well. It’s a good bit of news- and it will allow Xbox One players to finally realize the promise made to Xbox gamers all those years ago of interacting with their Xboxes with their voices.

The best part? You won’t need an extremely expensive Kinect to do it. No, Kinect on Xbox One will not be the only way to engage with Cortana- you can do it via your headset too. This is important, because until now, Microsoft have reserved voice commands for Xbox One exclusively for Kinect users.

I imagine Cortana being hosted in the Cloud may be the reason here- the Xbox One itself doesn’t actually have to do any language processing. It has long been speculated that voice commands on Xbox One have been reserved for Kinect because the Kinect’s co-processor allows for full language processing. Cortana being hosted online, I imagine, would sidestep that requirement entirely.