11 things you probably didn’t know the Switch 2 can do

Eight years ago, just before the release of the Nintendo Switch, we provided an in-depth review of the hardware thanks to early production units provided by Nintendo. This year, Nintendo has opted not to provide such unrestricted early press access to the Switch 2 hardware, citing a "day-one update" to the system software and some launch games that would supposedly make pre-release evaluation more difficult.

As such, we won't be able to provide our full thoughts on the Switch 2 until well after the system is in players' hands. While that's not an ideal situation for readers looking to make an early purchase decision, we'll do our best to give you our hands-on impressions as soon as possible after launch day.

In lieu of review access, though, we were able to get some extended hands-on time with the final Switch 2 hardware at a daylong preview event held by Nintendo last week. This event provided our first look at the console's system-level menu and settings, as well as features like GameChat (which was hard to fully evaluate in an extremely controlled environment).

While this access was far from sufficient for a full review, it did let us discover a few interesting features that we weren't aware of beforehand. Here are some of the new tidbits we stumbled across during our day with the Switch 2 hardware.

GameChat can generate captions for live speech

One of the most unexpected accessibility features of the Switch 2 is the system's ability to automatically generate on-screen captions for what friends are saying during a GameChat session. These captions appear in their own box that can be set to the side of the main gameplay. The captioning system seemed pretty fast and accurate in our test and could even update captions from multiple speakers at the same time.