New updates for both the Xbox consoles and the Xbox App have been rolled out today, bringing with them new features, but let’s start with the app.

Available in Australia, with other regions getting them soon, Xbox Stories are just like the Stories you see on Instagram or Facebook, except they are within the Xbox App. Stories lets you showcase your skills and keep up to date with your friends. You can share your favourite gaming moments including game clips, screenshots, and achievements with your friends and the Xbox community. You can also reply to your friends’ stories with a message or a quick reaction.

The stories channel is located right on the home screen of the Xbox app. To create a story, click the + button on your gamertag located within the stories channel, and then select the game clip, screenshot, or achievement that you want to post from the gallery. Once selected, you will go to a story preview page where you can choose to add a caption to your post and then click the post button located on the bottom right. The stories channel shows content from the last 72 hours, and anything you share is also posted to your activity feed on your profile.

Moving over to the consoles, the new update brings with it Quality of Service Tagging, or QoS for short and its a new feature for Xbox. What this does is allow you to set priority tags on latency-sensitive outbound networking traffic such as party chat, console streaming, and multiplayer - in supported games. This helps protect your gaming experience from connection issues during times of congestion on supported networks.

More details on this can be found on the Xbox Support site, just be aware it is a little technical in its delivery, so if you are not confident with your home network setup, double check before you start tinkering with things.