Saw this posted on Polygon:
Mike Nichols, chief marketing officer for Xbox gave an interview
Nichols said that when Cortana comes to the Xbox One - the voice or text search AI is scheduled for a preview sometime this year - it will include Kinect support. You'll also be able to use it with a headset and microphone or by typing in your search, he said.
That is AWESOME news, and something that definitely needed to happen! What I would love to see MS do is come out with a small mic device that is no bigger that the IR bar you got with the Wii. Something you could discreetly place on top of your TV and it would allow you to use voice commands without the Kinect or constantly wearing a head phone.
I enjoy my Kinect for what it does well, but, the motion controls are pretty much dead now. So you shouldn't need to buy a $150 peripheral JUST to use your voice. Especially since they are ditching motion controls anyway, according to the article.
What that means to gamers is that with the rollout of the major new user-interface redesign they'll see mostly a de-emphasis on Kinect controls.
Gesture controls on the menus, for instance, have been completely removed.
"That currently exists in the Xbox One experience, but we found so few people use it," Nichols said. "Why should we keep designing for that scenario?"
And the decision to not update gesture with the new user interface - which means no longer supporting it - meant that from an engineering perspective, that time was freed up to work on other things.
http://www.polygon.com/2015/10/16/95496 ... ox-one-use