Now you don’t need to stress out about cleaning up your room before the next Skype call with your bosses. The video conferencing service has now introduced a blurred background feature, which means that whatever is behind you gets blurred out while you, the participant in that video call, remains in focus.
Microsoft is adding this feature to Skype, some months after it introduced this in another service called Microsoft Teams. In Skype, all you need to do is select the select “blur my background” option to activate this for the duration you leave this option enabled.
The background blur feature in Skype and Teams relies on artificial intelligence (AI) which has been trained in human form detection and is used to keep the person in focus during the call. The detection is trained to understand human hair, hands, skin, facial contours and limbs, and constantly analyses the surroundings basis the movement of the person on the call screen, to keep the rest of the background blurred.
But all this does come with a caveat. Microsoft does clarify that “we do our best to make sure that your background is always blurred, but we cannot guarantee that your background will always be blurred.”
Microsoft says that background blur is now available on most desktops and laptops with the latest version of the Skype app. Quite handy then, if you haven’t had the time to tidy up, before that important business call.
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