Skip to main content

Microsoft Launches 'Made For India' Skype Lite App


Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stage in Mumbai and announced a new version of Skype at the Future Decoded conference. This new version of Skype which has been dubbed Skype Lite has been specifically made for India and Microsoft's primary target audience are people who use low or mid range Android smartphones instead of users with high-end iOS and Android smartphones.
In the words of Microsoft's Eugene Ho, " It is a new version of Skype made for India, developed by the development centre Microsoft has in Hyderabad."
Skype Lite at launch will only be available in India for Android smartphones. Going forward, Microsoft has plans to release the app for iOS and Windows and it will access the response towards the app and accordingly release the app in other markets.
"Packed in a 13MB file, the new app is available only for Android devices and is especially designed to save data," Satya Nadella, Indian-born CEO of Microsoft, told the media at the company's "Future Decoded" event here.

 
The lightweight app supports Indian languages including Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. "Skype Lite" has data-friendly features such as "tracking data usage" which tells a user about how much data was used. It also categorises the internet usage into two sections -- the amount of mobile data or Wifi used while using the app.

Microsoft also introduced a dark theme for the new app making it easy for users to work in the night without having much strain in the eyes. It is an all-in-one app and has functionalities such as integrated calling and SMS by which a user can make it the default calling and messaging app.
Skype Lite can also double as the dialer and SMS app replacing the stock Android solution. It integrates Skype calls and messages with mobile calls and SMS. The interface is also divided into 4 tabs Messaging, Calls, Contacts and Bots.
The messaging tab is the most interesting one as it divides the tab into conversations, group chats and promotions tab. For the promotions tab Microsoft uses artificial intelligence to weed out messages which you don't want to see. Promotional messages are a big problem in India and that's the problem Microsoft is trying to solve here.
The company said it plans to integrate Aadhaar, India’s national digital identity scheme, to enable certain services from June. That can "enable Skype users to verify the identity of unknown callers in a variety of situations where identification verification is required, including job interviews, goods and property sale," Microsoft said in a blog post.
Microsoft says that millions of users are using Skype in India. Some executives also said that many new people continue to download the app in India. However, it didn't share exact figures of how many people use Skype in India. Interestingly, globally Skype is being used by 300 million users which is as per Microsoft's last update in 2016.

Read On :  WordPress / UCNews

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tech Mahindra sees bigger business from Vodafone-Idea merger

Indian software major Tech Mahindra views the proposed merger of telecom giant Vodafone and Idea as a "seismic" event that will impact the IT sector. Tech Mahindra sees the proposed merger of Vodafone and Idea as a "seismic" event that will impact the IT sector, but asserted that it will benefit from such a deal.  The software firm derives over half of its revenue from servicing communication companies. "It is a big market where these people are merging together. In my world, it is a seismic change . It is not an ordinary change. Clearly, it means that certain part of the IT spend will either come down or get re-directed ," Tech Mahindra MD and CEO CP Gurnani told PTI here over the weekend.   However, he said that rather than being affected, Tech Mahindra may benefit from such a merger. "The reason it may not have any impact on us, as a matter of fact it will get better for us, because for both the companies our primary focus is
Post a Comment
Read more

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 will definitely run Windows 10

Microsoft announced at its 2016 WinHEC conference that Windows 10 will run on ARM processors by breaking Intel's bolt on the platform. While Qualcomm will do the same but there is quite possibility that Snapdragon 835 could support Windows Holographic for Virtual Reality headsets. This isn't the smartphone-focused Windows 10 Mobile or the severely limited Windows RT , either, but the same version of Windows 10 that runs on PCs.   Not only will Windows 10 run on ARM processors, but full desktop apps like Office 2016 and Adobe Photoshop will run on them as well. By various accounts, Windows 10 will first arrive on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 processor sometime in late 2017. According to Qualcomm " The Snapdragon 835 is designed to support  next-generatio n entertainment experiences and connected cloud services for premium-tier consumer and enterprise devices, including smartphones , VR/AR head-mounted displays , IP cameras , tablets , mobile PCs
Post a Comment
Read more

Google Assistant comes to every Android phone, 6.0 and up

If you like the idea of Google Assistant but didn't like the fact that it was tied to the Pixel range , there's some good news. Google has announced that the handy helper is making its way to all Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Android 7.0 Nougat smartphones. The roll out starts this week , and brings Siri and Cortana like voice control to millions of Android users . Earlier today at MWC 2017 in Barcelona , the newly-announced LG G6 became the first non-Pixel device to offer Google Assistant. Google now says that the feature is coming to "eligible Android phones running Nougat and Marshmallow with Google Play Services" . Google is finally lifting the arbitrary limits on the Google Assistant and bringing it to all Android phones running version 6.0 and up—about 30 percent of active devices. Soon, an update to the Go ogle Search app- which the Assistant is a part of-should arrive and enable the new voice interface on all devices that can handle it.
Post a Comment
Read more