Alexa is moving even deeper into Microsoft territory. Amazon’s digital brain and the Google Assistant appear bound for Xbox to control the console via voice commands.
Windows Central reports that upcoming Xbox One builds will feature a new digital assistant section under the Kinect & Devices menu. There, users can enable Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana, as well as Alexa and the Google Assistant.
It remains unclear what kinds of capabilities digital assistants will have with Xbox, but they could fill the voice-controlled void left by the discontinued Kinect device. Such an integration could also lead to the ability to control an Xbox console via a Google Home or Amazon Echo.
Alexa has been showing up in a few Microsoft products in recent months. She made her debut on Windows 10 notebooks last month, through new devices from Acer.
While Amazon and Microsoft are competing in the digital assistant market, they are also cooperating. The two companies showed off the first integrations of the digital assistants at the Microsoft Build conference last month, a pretty basic interplay between Alexa and Cortana that is also very much unprecedented.
Microsoft has gone the enterprise route with Cortana, focusing less on consumers and smart home integrations the way Amazon and Google are. It has not produced an in-house smart speaker like the Echo or Google Home, though Cortana did show up in the Harmon Kardon Invoke speaker last year.
