Following the massive popularity garnered by Zoom in the past year, Microsoft has been adding various new features to its OG video calling service Skype to rival the competition. Now, the Redmond giant has shared its future plans for Skype and teased various changes coming to the video conferencing platform in the coming weeks. As per the teasers, Skype users are about to witness a lot of changes.
Microsoft will also add many new viewing options for the Call Stage screen. This includes the grid view, speaker view, a large gallery view, and the Together mode (similar to Microsoft Teams) that makes it seem like everyone in a call is sharing a common space. Plus, Skype will now also show beautiful backgrounds for the audio-only participants and they are the same images that the platform uses for its background replacement feature. However, users will still get the option to hide audio-only participants on Skype.
On the performance front, Microsoft says that it optimized Skype in key scenarios to deliver a 30% boost in performance on desktop, and over 2,000% increase on Android. In addition, mobile users will also be able to use the Office Lens app to scan documents while on a call to instantly share them with the participants.
