We’re happy to confirm that starting in July, Xbox One customers in New Zealand will be given the option to turn on voice control and use the existing English voice model.

This allows you to control your Xbox One with the sound of your voice, switching between games and entertainment by simply saying commands like, “Xbox, go to Forza Motorsport 5,” “Xbox, go to Xbox Video,” “Xbox, go home” among others.  This will be part of the public preview first, slated to be available mid-June, and will roll out to users throughout the market shortly thereafter. As always, roll out timing is contingent on user feedback and engineering considerations.

While the experience is not completely localised for New Zealand and we have more work to do, we want users to be able to enable existing voice models while we work to add more voice features over time through subsequent system updates. Our vision is to bring conversational voice to every country where we sell Xbox and we are working hard to deliver on that promise.