In a major push for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Skill India' mission, Microsoft's Indian-born CEO Satya Nadella on Wednesday launched "Project Sangam" to help the government not only train but also assist 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 enroll through Aadhaar cards and later utilise LinkedIn to manage their profiles," Nadella said during Microsoft's prestigious "Future Decoded" event here.
As soon as the training is completed, Microsoft will update their profiles for employers to shortlist and hire the skilled workers. The candidates will also receive job options according to their skills.
Billed as one of the largest such pacts in the global social media space, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for USD 26.2 billion in an all-cash deal last year.
At the event, Nadella also launched Skype Lite, an exclusive “Made for India” app to provide seamless experience in messaging, audio and video calling even at lower bandwidths.
“Packed in a 13MB file, the new app is available only for Android devices and is especially designed to save data,” said Nadella.
The lightweight app supports Indian languages including Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu.
"Skype Lite" has data-friendly features such as "tracking data usage" which tells a user about how much data was used.
It also categorises the internet usage into two sections -- the amount of mobile data or 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 also introduced a dark theme for the new app making it easy for users to work in the night without having much strain in the eyes.
"Skype Lite" is an all-in-one app and has functionalities such as integrated calling and SMS by which a user can make it the default calling and messaging app.
To make it easier for a user to differentiate between important and junk SMSs, Microsoft has used the artificial intelligence (AI) that segregates normal text messages, Skype messages and promotional texts under three different categories.
"Skype Lite" has an integrated camera app with 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.
"Future Decoded" -- Microsoft's two-day flagship technology and business conference -- is a platform that brings together 1,500 business and government decision-makers to engage in conversations on how technology will transform all aspects of our work and life.
