You wake up in the morning, walk into the living room and say “Xbox on” to activate your gaming console.

This could very well be reality if there’s truth to a recent report from The Verge. Sources close to Microsoft’s plan for the next-generation Xbox told The Verge that the new Xbox will include improved speech recognition software similar to Apple’s Siri and will support natural language controls and speech-to-text.

The current Xbox already has some voice recognition ability, but this would be an obvious upgrade. The new Xbox will also reportedly be able to use the Kinect to detect how many players are in the room for multiplayer suggestions. Other cool features include the ability to ask “what my friends are playing” to open up a friends list and ask the Xbox to “play a movie.”

Microsoft’s global console sales fell more than 28 percent, to 5.9 million units, in the 2012 holiday quarter, according to numbers released by the company last month.

Previously on GeekWire: Consumers spent $14.8B on video game content in 2012, down 9 percent from last year

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