Following up on plans to modernize Skype detailed earlier this year, the Skype team has announced some upcoming changes that should improve both group calling and the voicemail experience.

The first of the upcoming changes includes a tweak to the way group calls work, ensuring that the conversation can continue even if the person that started the call hangs up. From the Skype blog:

Now, when the person who initiates a call hangs up, the call will carry on smoothly no matter who leaves or joins the conversation. This means that the discussion won't be interrupted if someone has to greet an unexpected visitor at the door, or even if dinner is ready.

Secondly, the Skype team has some plans to modernize the voicemail experience, allowing users to forego a traditional voicemail in favor of a video or chat message instead. Traditional voicemail will stick around, but the blog post notes that custom voicemail greetings, email notifications and SMS transcription are all going away.

As noted earlier this year, an unfortunate side effect of this modernization process has been the dropping of support for Skype on Windows Phone 8 as of this month. However, it's good to see that some progress is being made to bring some convenient new tweaks and features to those on supported platforms.

While a concrete timeline for when the new features will land isn't available, the blog post mentions that the rollout should begin "over the course of the next several weeks."