Years ago, SMS (short message service) was the one and only platform for texting, but now apps like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts among others have become more preferred and convenient options. This doesn’t mean SMS is going to become obsolete anytime soon. It has subtly morphed from personal texting platform to a professional one. Now if you receive a SMS, it will be mostly from various service providers such as banks, d2h connections, mobile service providers or e-commerce portals, updating account information or sending one-time-passwords for financial transactions.
Microsoft recently announced that it is bringing the SMS Insights feature to its Skype Lite mobile application for Android users. This feature is basically meant for managing and organising your text messages. In a day people receive many messages, including spam, and it becomes difficult to find that one important message like the travel PNR details or a movie ticket. Here’s where this new feature will come handy as it will sort your SMS in different categories like finance, shopping, travel, reminder, and promotions and keep the users updated with the relevant action links such as bill payments, flight check-in and customer care numbers.
For example, under the finance category, Insights will automatically accumulate all the information and show you details like your current balances across your accounts and wallets, based on your most recent SMS messages. The 'reminder' category will alert you about pending bill payments. The most useful part is the 'promotions' category which sort all your SMS that talk about various discounts and offers in one place, eliminating the need to go through spam messages.
The feature appears to have some similarities with Google Cards, which also analyzes the phone data to provide relevant information. But the difference here is that the app analyzes only your SMS and doesn’t pop up information and details on your home screen.
Clearing the doubts about security concerns, especially when it comes to finance, a blog post by Microsoft said, “SMS Insights are enabled for Skype Lite users, only after they provide SMS permission to the Skype Lite app. All the SMS classification and categorisation happens locally on your phone. Microsoft doesn’t read or store your SMS information.”
The Skype Lite app was originally built specifically for India as a video calling and chatting tool for Android mobiles—a lighter version of the classic Skype Voice over Internet Protocol ( VoIP) solution for Internet voice and video calls.
