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Xbox One announced: motion, voice and dash functions shown

Xbox One has been officially revealed at Microsoft's Redmond campus, putting to bed months of speculation.

The console was revealed by Microsoft's Don Mattrick at the event. He took to the stage to announce the console at the event, and discussed the evolution of the living room, the power of voice and gesture and the importance of Xbox Live. He asked how Microsoft can take what we love and make it better, and suggested that harmonising the fragmented facets of entertainment is the way forward.

He said the concept must be simple and complete, giving you everything you need in one unit. It's cloud-powered, and looks very stylish.

It's going to be voice activated, and can connect to all of your home devices. There is Kinect-style voice commands, no manual log-in and no delay between turning the unit on and logging it.

It also remembers the last thing you were doing - be it playing a game, watching a movie or listening to music. It also does away with the need of changing TV inputs to watch television. By saying 'Xbox, watch TV' you can watch your telly instantly.

Switching between Internet Explorer, TV, music and games will be controlled by voice and will be as fast as switching channels on your TV remote. There is also motion gestures such as grabbing, panning, swiping and more.

By using the new 'Snap' function you can pin windows to the home menu to keep on watching a movie while you do other things, such as search for related content, or browse the internet.

Skype is also an internal part of the console. You can also use 'Snap' to picture-in-picture while taking a call using the service.

There's also ESPN functionality that showed live score trackers and a 'Fantasy' function which will show up fantasy sports league players as they score. You can then say 'Show Fantasy' to see the goal or score.

TV guides are a big part of the console, with live channel guides that are fully controlled using voice. You can call up channels like HBO just by saying 'What's on HBO', 'Watch CBS', or 'Show the guide' so seamlessly flick between them.

You can create custom channels, queue up favourite shows and more.

What do you think so far?

Read Steph's full coverage of the Xbox One reveal here if you missed anything from the show.

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Dave Cook avatar

Dave Cook

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Dave worked on VG247 for an extended period manging much of the site's news output. As well as his experience in games media, he writes for comics, and now specializes in books about gaming history.

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