Xbox One March update starts rolling out with screenshot feature, suggested friends, spam reporting, and more

Microsoft began rolling out the Xbox One March update today, which includes one of the most requested features from the community: screenshot support. Other notable improvements include additions to Friends, chat, and sharing.

You can now take screenshots while playing a game. Just double-tap the Xbox button on your controller to capture a screenshot and then press Y to save it. If you’re already in the process of hitting way too many buttons all at once (and have a Kinect), you can also say “Xbox, take a screenshot,” which will both capture and save one for you.

The screenshot feature has also resulted in an update to the Upload app, which can now manage your screenshots in addition to your game clips. You can use the Upload app to set a screenshot as your background, post screenshots to your activity feed, attach them to messages, add screenshots to your showcase, share them to Twitter, and upload them to OneDrive.

The Xbox One now has a suggested friends function so you can see a list of players you might know and want to game with, as well as “top community broadcasters and clip creators” to add content to your activity feed. Speaking of friends, you can now share your real name (Friends => My profile => Name sharing settings) with all your friends, or even to everyone in the Xbox Live community.

Previously, you could only share your real name with select friends (or no one). That said, Microsoft underlines that Gamertags are still the primary method of identifying yourself on Xbox Live — real names are still a secondary option and not a requirement.

Next up, party chat has gained two new icons to show each participant their own microphone status: the Kinect icon means the Kinect is being used as the microphone and the headset icon means the headset microphone is being used. Speaking of chat, the Messages app now lets you report a message as spam (select it, press A on the controller, choose Report, and then pick Spam).

Another request Xbox One gamers made was for Microsoft to tweak tile transparency. You can now thus vary the level of transparency for your background images (Settings => My Xbox => Tile transparency).

Speaking of settings, you can now share voice search data anonymously with Microsoft (Settings => Privacy and online safety => Custom => Share voice search data). The company can analyze your voice data that you use for Bing on Xbox to search to hopefully improve voice recognition across its products.

Xbox One owners in Australia will be happy to learn support for OneGuide free-to-air TV listings is now available Down Under. The OneGuide app will be pre-pinned for users in Australia a few days after the March system update goes live. In related news, Australians can now pre-purchase the Xbox Digital TV Tuner at the online Microsoft Store (set to arrive on March 25, 2015).

To get the update, fire up your Xbox One and navigate to Settings and then the System section. If you can select the System Update button, your console is ready to download and install the update.