Microsoft, striving to grow its presence in India, has launched a new Skype app aimed at smartphone users in the country who often struggle with unreliable internet speeds and want to reduce their data costs.
Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, launched Skype Lite, a reduced size version of the popular video calling app, during a visit to Mumbai on Wednesday.
This will allow Microsoft to compete against Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which dominates the communications app market in India.
“We aim to empower every Indian and every Indian organisation to achieve more,” said Mr Nadella, who is originally from Hyderabad. He said that Microsoft a year-and-a-half ago started investing in bringing cloud infrastructure to India.
The app is only 13MB in size and is powered by cloud services to reduce the storage space it takes up to allow it to run on budget smartphones.
It is designed specifically with the Indian market in mind and has not been launched in any other country yet.
As well as video and audio calls, the app’s other main features include its messaging service and chatbots.
Many smartphone users in India use 2G networks for data access because they are much cheaper than 3G and 4G services.
Microsoft describes Skype Lite as its “smallest and fastest Skype app to date”.
An interesting feature that could help Skype Lite to differentiate itself is the fact that it has been developed with India’s Aadhaar identity system integrated into the app, a feature that Microsoft says will be up and running by June. Aadhaar is an Indian government identity system that collects citizens’ biometric and demographic data.
“With this integration, Skype users will be able to authenticate the identity of unknown callers in a variety of situations where identification verification is required, including job interviews, goods and property sales,” according to Microsoft.
As well as English, the app has also been made available in seven local languages: Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.
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