Stuff spoke to Leo del Castillo, Xbox's General Manager of Console Development, who went into more detail on how exactly Kinect will function with the Xbox One.

First things first – the Xbox One will function as normal if Kinect isn’t plugged in, though it's "still designed to work best" with it connected. Castillo stated that the Xbox team knows that "there may be times you don’t want Kinect to respond to you", so they've provided gamers with several control options.

The first of these is standby mode. Simply saying “Kinect Off” puts the Kinect to sleep, where it will only respond to two simple words – “Kinect On”, and nothing else.

You can also choose to fully turn Kinect off within your system settings. Once you do this, Kinect will not respond to voice commands at all, and you’ll need to turn Kinect back on manually in the system settings to use it again.

And then of course there's the recently revealed option which is disconnecting the Kinect altogether. If you try to play a Kinect game with it disconnected, you'll be prompted to plug in or adjust your Kinect settings accordingly.

Ultimately, Castillo believes that "the new Kinect will let you experience entirely new magic moments making your gaming and entertainment better". It's clear that the Xbox team wants gamers to use the Kinect to unlock the full potential of the Xbox One. But at least you now have plenty of options if you're not too keen.