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.
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