Last week Microsoft offered the first of a two part update for the monthly Xbox One Preview Program and now this week the final part of the April updates are now being made available to preview participants.
Last week's updates delivered game hub links, detailed achievement notifications and some party chat improvements to participants consoles and with this weeks update another big user request makes it to the Xbox One console.
Here is a quick run down of those additional updates for April:
- Voice messages – Xbox One preview program members will be able to compose and playback voice messages in the messages app when snapped on Xbox One. Quickly and easily record audio to send to your friends or others through your snapped messages app accessed through a simple quick double tap of the Xbox button. Additionally, voice messages can be exchanged between Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles.
- Dedicated servers for party chat – We’re enhancing party chat with dedicated chat relay servers that will enable Xbox One owners that may have historically had NAT issues to party chat more reliably. Parties where players are unable to form direct peer-to-peer connections for party chat will automatically leverage dedicated server infrastructure to relay traffic. This service is only enabled for parties where one or more members are previewing the April system update.
- What’s On – The Xbox engineering team is continuing to experiment with the What’s On area, which highlights popular videos, movies, TV shows and game broadcasts. We’re continuing to test different experiences for preview members in the U.S. and this month, the preview of this feature is being expanded to Canada and the UK as well.
I must say the cross platform ability to send voice messages to your friends on Xbox 360 is a terrific addition as so many of those consoles are still out there. Maybe someday we will also see some improvements with cross platform multiplayer gaming as well between the two consoles.
In this video Xbox Live's Major Nelson talks with one of the Xbox engineers about these updates:
