Satya Nadella launches Made for India Skype Lite app and 'Project Sangam'

Satya Nadella,, the CEO of Microsoft today announced new made for India products marking a move beyond its traditional business to build a broader audience in the country. Among the new products include a lightweight version of the Skype video calling app aimed to cater to the needs of Indians who are on low-end smartphones, and a job search platform for low-skilled people here in India. 

'Made for India' Skype Lite app

The Redmond-based tech company today launched Skype Lite, an exclusive "Made for India" app to provide better messaging experience in audio and video calling at lower bandwidths. Packed in a 13MB file, the new app is available only for Android devices and is designed to save data, said Satya Nadella, Indian-born CEO of Microsoft, at the"Future Decoded" event in Mumbai. 

The app supports Indian languages including Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. "Skype Lite" has data-friendly features such as "tracking data usage". 

The app can also categorise your internet usage into two sections -- the amount of mobile data and Wifi used while using the app. With these new features, the app lets a user to share multimedia files without downloading them to the device. 

Microsoft is also using its natural language processing and image recognition technologies to come up with a host of bots within Skype. 

The company introduced a dark theme for the new app making it easy for users to easily work in the night. "Skype Lite" has functionalities such as integrated calling and SMS by which a user can make it the default calling and messaging app. 

Lite app has an integrated camera app in it and added fun bots with a conversational interface that runs on Microsoft's AI technology. The bots, for example, can recognise a selfie and tell about a person's age and his/her character using the algorithms and artificial learning. 

'Project Sangam' to skill people in India

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella also launched "Project Sangam" to help the government not only train but also help people get jobs via professional networking website LinkedIn that was acquired by the company last year. 

Aimed at employing and empowering the people, "Project Sangam" will commence from Andhra Pradesh. The company will allow people to enrol through Aadhaar cards and later utilise LinkedIn to manage their profiles. Sangam will allow the government to reach out to remote locations candidates, and it will also help them in remote learning through Skype. 

LinkedIn, which has more than 35 million of its over 430 million users in India, retained its distinct brand, culture and independence. 

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