With Together mode, Microsoft wants team members and meeting participants to appear as if they are in the same location. It is a small touch, but a nice one for organizations that value a uniform output. By using AI segmentation, Microsoft Teams can place meeting participants within a shared background. The idea behind this is to make it look more like participants are in the same room together. The feature originally landed on Teams in July 2020 and later came to Android and Skype users. However, on Skype the feature was limited to large meetings. Microsoft is now expanding the ability, so Together mode now works on 1:1 calls on Skype. In the announcement by Skype chief Luis Carrasco, Microsoft also debuted a new Scene for the platform. Specifically, a plane scene.
Future of Skype
What will happen with Skype moving forward remains to be seen. For the time being, Skype is not going anywhere, but it is hard to see how it can continue to co-exist with Microsoft Teams in the long term. This is especially true now that Microsoft Teams is being baked into Windows 11. On Windows 11 , Microsoft Teams is now directly integrated into the platform. This means Teams users can unmute and mute voice and video calls in the system tray on the Taskbar. Furthermore, when Teams is running in the background, a “Share this Windows” option is available when hovering over the app icon. This allows users to share an app windows with Teams contacts through the Taskbar. Tip of the day: By default computer names in Windows 10 tend to be quite plain. By default, they tend to be ‘WIN’ or ‘Desktop’, followed by a string of random letters and numbers. We show you how to change your PC name with Settings, Command Prompt or PowerShell to make it more easily identifiable.
