Skype, Hangout, Slack, Microsoft Teams, zoom, and many more chat and video calling applications we have but as a developer, we use a single application for a project, mostly one that our client is comfortable with.

I have to use Skype and there are no official APIs for automating Skype unlike other applications so I found an unofficial opensource python library SkPY for interacting with the Skype HTTP API.

The aim of this library is to provide feature-complete support for Skype for Web. So far, it supports:

• contacts: retrieving the contact list and groups, sending and responding to invites, searching the directory
• conversations: sending text messages, marking read, rich text formatting, file/image transfers, shared contacts
• group chats: creating new conversations, adding/removing members, delegating admins, setting topic/history, join URLs
• events: receiving conversation messages, status and endpoint changes
• and more: translation API, user settings, credit/subscription info

Here is the sample python code snippet to automatically respond to a message

from skpy import SkypeEventLoop, SkypeNewMessageEvent

class SkypePing(SkypeEventLoop):
    def __init__(self):
        super(SkypePing, self).__init__(username, password)
        print("initialized! watching for events")
    def onEvent(self, event):
        if isinstance(event, SkypeNewMessageEvent) \
          and not event.msg.userId == self.userId :
          # sending automated reply
          event.msg.chat.sendMsg("Hi there! Maulik is currently not available. If urgent you can call him at 91********")

sk = SkypePing()
sk.loop()

Let's see the demo

We can achieve many things by automation like we can create a script to send a reminder to a group/person and schedule it through cron job or we can keep watch on how many calls we have attended and how much time we spent on skype meetings etc.