Amazon’s Alexa can now control your Xbox One

Microsoft

• The Xbox One is getting voice support from Amazon’s
  Alexa, Microsoft announced on Thursday morning.
• The Xbox One already supports Microsoft’s voice
  assistant, Cortana, but it requires a Kinect or other connected
  Xbox microphone.
• Support for Alexa comes through various Echo devices,
  like the Amazon Echo.

“Alexa, turn on my Xbox” is finally a reality.

That’s because the Xbox One is getting support for Amazon’s
Alexa, Microsoft announced on Thursday. You’ll flip a switch in
settings, enable whatever “skills” are required for your Amazon
Echo device of choice, and you’re off to the races.

More than just turning on the console, Alexa can do a bunch of
different things with your Xbox One — launch games, pause that
Netflix show you’re watching, and even capture screenshots
mid-game. 

Microsoft

If it sounds familiar, that’s because the Xbox One — and the Xbox
360 before it — could already be voice-controlled through the
Kinect peripheral. 

When the Xbox One launched in 2013 for the astronomical price of
$500, it was so expensive because of the pricey camera/microphone
combination — the so-called Kinect 2.0.

Kinect offered some pretty impressive features out of the box.
You could turn on your Xbox One using your voice (“Xbox On!”) —
it would even turn on your TV for you as well. But the $500 price
of the console plus Kinect kept potential buyers away, and
Microsoft quickly dropped Kinect from the bundle to lower the
price.

Over time, as more people bought Xbox One consoles without
Kinect, Microsoft quietly hid much of the voice functionality
that was intrinsic to the console at launch. Eventually, some of
that functionality resurfaced as Microsoft’s Cortana digital
assistant. If you had a Kinect attached, or some other
microphone, you could use Cortana — but that’s a small subset of
overall Xbox One users.

But now, with the mass popularity of voice-assisted devices like
Amazon’s Echo, Google’s Home, and Apple’s HomePod, the Xbox One
adding support for Amazon’s Alexa could smartly repurpose much of
the functionality that’s already built-in to the Xbox One.
Instead of using an expensive peripheral, owners can use the
Amazon Echo devices that they already own and use regularly with
their voice.

To learn how to enable your Echo devices to work with your Xbox
One,
check out these instructions from Microsoft.