Over the past few years, Skype has made forays into the living room with a number of collaborations with third parties. These used smart TVs or Blu-ray boxes, paired with cameras. Now owned by Microsoft, Skype has a new way of chatting from the comfort of your sofa, and this time it's a first party product: the Xbox One.

Xbox One systems will come with Skype pre-installed, and since every unit will also ship with a Kinect, they'll also include 1080p-capable cameras and beamforming stereo microphones, making them pretty much the perfect setup for a Skype-on-TV experience. As an added bonus, Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers buying Xbox Ones will also get Skype Premium for free for six months, enabling group video calls and 100 minutes of telephone calling to some 60 countries.

We spent some time in Skype's Stockholm office last week and talked to Todd Roshak, program manager for Skype on Xbox, to learn more about Microsoft's plans for the client.

At the moment, the software supports all the core Skype communication capabilities, with text messaging, voice calling (including to PSTN telephones), and 1080p video conferencing, including group chat with up to four participants. As with other Xbox One applications, its UI is a Metro-style affair and can be controlled using voice, gesture, a gamepad, or a SmartGlass app on a tablet. A limited number of Skype contacts can be set as favorites, and these can be voice dialed from anywhere within the Xbox interface: just say "Xbox call" and the software will spring into action.

The overall experience is a little uneven. Voice and video chat work well, but instant messaging with the on-screen keyboard is, unsurprisingly, a rather slow and laborious process. SmartGlass makes this much better by providing a real typing solution.

Skype on Xbox One doesn't attempt to match every feature found in the desktop client—there's no file transfer support, for example—but it does support some of the less common features, such as screen sharing: desktop users can show their desktops to Skype users watching on the Xbox One.

That said, the Xbox One client does have some features not found in other Skype versions. Traditionally, Skype tends to be used with webcams either integrated into laptop lids or perched atop desktop monitors. These cameras naturally frame users, showing their head or upper bodies by default. In a living room scenario, that's not usually the case; most of the time you'll be standing or sitting some distance away from the camera, taking up much less of the picture.

To make the Skype experience feel a little more up-close and personal on the Xbox One, the client can Auto Zoom. That is, when a single person is visible, the client will try to crop the video to center the frame on the person's head and upper body. With two or more people in front of the camera, the cropping won't be as aggressive (to try to keep everyone in the frame) but Skype will still strive to keep the focus on the humans rather than their surroundings.

To do this, Skype on Xbox One actually takes advantage of Kinect's skeleton tracking capabilities. It identifies all the skeletons the camera can see and crops the picture to ensure that they remain visible.

As a result, Auto Zoom can keep the conversation feeling intimate even with a large distance between camera and sofa.

Skype on Xbox One also uses the console's unique audio codec features. Both Skype audio and in-game voice communication use the SILK codec, and so the Xbox One has a hardware implementation of the codec to ensure that the CPU overhead is minimized. The Skype client on Xbox One takes advantage of this hardware.

The Skype app is just an app, not part of the core Xbox One system software, and as such, Microsoft intends to update it regularly to make it richer and more capable. In updates coming soon, the company will add the ability to mark groups as favorites (so that they can use global voice commands), to filter contacts by their online service, and to set your profile picture to either your Xbox avatar or a photo taken with the Kinect camera.

Looking further into the future, while Roshak wouldn't commit to any specific features, there are clearly things that Microsoft is thinking about that would enhance the experience. Currently, Skype doesn't support Xbox One's "snap an app to a narrow strip" feature. Voice calls can be used in the background, but this lack of snap support means it's not possible to have, for example, video calls concurrent with a game. This would obviously be a nice thing to add: both one-on-one competitive multiplayer and co-operative multiplayer would be enriched by being able to see the person you were playing against or with, so that you could watch their reactions as you crushed them (or were crushed by them).

Similarly, greater voice control would be welcome. At the moment, the Xbox's voice commands come in two kinds; the global commands prefixed with "Xbox" and a "say what you see" mode where any item visible on-screen has a speakable label. For Skype's text chat, a third option would be welcome: dictation. Roshak told us that this was something that the team is looking at closely. Personnel changes at Microsoft might hint at this too. Gurdeep Singh Pall was part of the Bing team's senior leadership that was responsible for, among other things, Bing's speech recognition platform. Pall moved to Skype last month.

Even without these features, the Xbox One Skype experience is solid and effective. The big question is, will people want to use Skype on their consoles from their living rooms? Using Skype this way simply feels very different from using it on a PC. Although Auto Zoom works to put you "closer" to the person you're talking to, there's still a physical separation, as you'll tend to be several feet away from the TV, and this can make the conversation feel a bit less personal.

On the other hand, it means that Skype works much better for other kinds of calls. Getting the kids gathered around the TV to talk to the grandparents, for example, is probably going to be easier than trying to get everyone gathered around a laptop or PC in the home office. Will Xbox One users leap at the chance of chatting in this way? I think it could go either way.

One place where the Xbox One's Skype features do seem like a surefire win is a million miles from the living room: the conference room. It's easy to see ways in which the Skype client could leverage the Kinect sensor to become a good conference room video tool, for example by using the beamforming microphones to detect where a speaker is and cropping the video accordingly. Sticking an Xbox One and its Kinect on the conference room TV surely can't be Microsoft's enterprise solution—but it almost feels like it should be. Perhaps when the Kinect for Windows 2 is released next year, we'll see desktop Skype and Lync pick up comparable capabilities.

Listing image by Skype