Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Sony announced that it will begin rolling out its second PS5 software beta on Wednesday, bringing changes including party chat updates, new UI settings, and a preview of a voice command feature.
According to Sony’s blog about the beta, your PS5 can listen for the “Hey PlayStation!” voice command to let you find and open games, apps, and settings as well as control playback during a show or a song. If you don’t want to use it, Sony says you can turn the feature off in settings. The voice command feature will be available first in English for beta users with accounts registered in the US and the UK.
Image: Sony
Here are the settings for the upcoming voice commands feature.
Sony is also making some changes to party chats. Voice chats are now called parties, and you can now choose whether a party is open, meaning your friends can join without an invitation, or closed. However, only other users on the beta can join open parties for the moment.
There are a handful of other new features as well, such as the ability to keep certain games or apps on the Home screen, updates to the design of trophy cards, and more screen reader languages. You can read the full list of features on the PlayStation blog. (Suspiciously absent is the ability to have game captures auto-uploaded from your console to the PlayStation mobile app, which was briefly available in January before Sony disabled the feature.)
If you want to register for a chance to be a part of the PS5 beta, you can sign up here on Sony’s website, and if you are selected, the company says you’ll get an email on Wednesday when it is released. You can sign up here for a chance to test PS4 betas. Of course, the typical beta warnings apply — there’s always the chance you run into bugs, and Sony warns that not all of the features in the betas will make it to the final release.
Sony says the software updates for both PS5 and PS4 will be available for everyone globally later this year.