Microsoft Shows Off Xbox One “Snap” Feature

A new video from Microsoft demonstrates how the Xbox One will let you do two things at once.

In a new promo video on YouTube, Xbox Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Yusuf Mehdi shows off the “Snap” feature in action. In a nutshell, it lets you easily switch from a game to another feature, like live television or the “activity feed,” with a simple voice command. Once the second task is fired up, switching back to the game and keeping both running simultaneously is a matter of simply double-tapping the controller.

“I can literally do two things at once,” Medhi says in the trailer. “Examples of things that might be helpful for you when you’re playing a game, you might want to go out to a site like Machinima and get access to some of the videos they’ve got for game-level walkthroughs. Or maybe you want to go to ESPN and get access to your sports scores.”

“Two things at once!” he added. “Pretty fantastic.”

I have a hard time getting too terribly wound up about multitasking – I spent most of my day in front of a machine that’s typically doing about nine things at once, albeit not from the comfort of a couch – but even I have to admit that it is pretty cool, especially if it’s that accurately responsive to voice commands. Cool enough to help move units? We’ll start finding out on November 22.