With more people working from home, Zoom’s custom background feature was a massive hit. People started using custom backgrounds in clever new ways, and it was all quite funny.

More video calling apps are now getting the custom background feature. Microsoft announced custom background image support for Teams earlier this month, and Skype is now getting support for custom backgrounds this week.

Microsoft quietly started rolling out a new update to Skype that enables support for custom backgrounds on Windows, Mac, Linux, and web. Both Skype and Teams had already supported background blur, so from a technical point of view, this feature probably didn’t take a lot of effort to implement.

Skype’s custom background feature can be accessed from the Audio & Video settings on the app. From there, you can add multiple custom backgrounds and switch between them as you like.

As Neowin notes, the new feature does not seem to be available on Skype for Windows 10, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store. So if you are on Windows 10 and you are using the Skype app from the Microsoft Store, you will have to download the .exe version from the Skype website to be able to use custom backgrounds.

The new feature is available with Skype version 8.59.0.77 and it includes some other new features such as the ability to directly share files from the macOS Finder, quicker access to call controls in the chat menu, and the general bug fixes.

Tagged with Skype