In-conversation read receipts are either a useful way to keep track of text-based communication or a hindrance in ignoring people, depending on who you ask. They're finally coming to Skype — but only in its Insider Preview beta build. Now when someone reads a message in either one-on-one or group conversations, their avatar will appear underneath it.

Similar features are available from plenty of Skype competitors, like Hangouts and Facebook Messenger. Because the feature is only available to Skype "Insiders," read receipts will only show up when both the sender and recipient of a message are on the Insider Preview. They also don't appear in group messages with more than 20 people.

Read receipts in Skype conversations.

Marking a message unread doesn't have any effect on its read receipts, but messages read by users in Invisible mode won't show as read. And thankfully for Skype users in the habit of ghosting people, you can opt out of read receipts altogether in the service's privacy settings.

Read receipts are available now in Skype Preview.

UPDATE: 2018/09/14 11:46am PDT BY

Earlier this week, Skype v8.30.0.50 started heading out to users, bringing read receipts to the main Skype release. If that's more information than you're comfortable sharing, while enabled by default, you're still able to opt out of the feature, preventing other users from knowing whether or not you've seen their messages. And much like before when availability was limited to Insiders, both sender and recipient will have to be running a version of Skype on their device that supports this mode.

Microsoft reports that this new update will be heading out to users over the course of the next week. If you're feeling a tad impatient, go ahead and grab it now over on APK Mirror.

Source: Microsoft

Via: Engadget