Skype Preview For Android Will Soon Enable Texting From Your PC Or Mac
Microsoft seems intent on allowing you to access all the things from your Android device on your Windows computer. The biggest of these features has been the much talked about Your Phone app that is in testing and will be part of Redstone 5 build 1809. Your Phone will mirror content like recent Android photos over to your desktop to prevent users from having to email images to themselves. Eventually, it will allow users to text and answer calls directly on the PC.
As Windows and Android users are waiting to get full Your Phone availability, Microsoft is also talking up another way to share between your Android device and your PC or Mac in the form of a new feature coming for Skype. The Skype Preview app for Android has been updated with a new SMS Connect feature that allows users to send and receive SMS messaged from the Skype app installed on the PC.
Reports indicate that the toggle to turn on the SMS Connect feature in the app is in the Skype Preview app settings menu, however, the toggle isn't working right now. Despite this feature not being active right at this moment, Microsoft is actively promoting the feature and that would seem to indicate that it will go live very soon. Microsoft has talked the feature up via a tweet directly from the Skype Insider account below.
Based on your feedback for this feature, we're really excited to introduce SMS Connect to Insiders! You've seen our sneak peak of the setting in 8.29. 🙂 We'll let you know what scenarios to help test in future builds as we light up the feature.
— Skype Insider (@SkypeInsider) August 17, 2018
Skype on desktop machines is also offering users the option to use Skype SMS or the new SMS Connect feature. Admittedly that is a very odd offer considering that the feature isn’t live at the time of writing. Windows 10 users aren’t being offered the update at this time according to reports, but it is expected to
Call recording and encrypted private messages are rolling out across the platform right now. All users should already have access to private messages and call recording is landing soon according to Peter Skillman, the director of design for Skype and Outlook at Microsoft. You can see his tweet talking about that roll out below.
Roll out started with 8.27 and will be at 100% soon. Follow these steps: Start the audio/video call. During call, click Options [+] button & select “Start Recording”. You can stop recording call anytime you want. Once done, the recorded content will be available for everyone
— peter skillman (@peterskillman) August 16, 2018
