A newer service that develops alerting and notifications based on Artificial Intelligence has been acquired by Microsoft with the intent to merge the functionality directly into Office 365.
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A week after Salesforce.com Inc. revamped the calendar in its email extension to help users manage their meetings more easily, Microsoft Corp.is moving into the scheduling automation space as well.
Microsoft plans to shut down Genee’s existing service as of September 1 and was vague on just how the technology will be incorporated into Office and Office 365, though scheduling meetings seems a natural fit for Outlook. Under the hood, this was accomplished by use of natural language and processing and optimized decision-making algorithms.
Rajesh Jha, Microsoft corporate vice president, Outlook and Office 365, explained the type of solution that would now be offered to Microsoft customers: “Say you want to meet a potential customer, Diana, for coffee”. All of these methods allow the user to send Genee an email address to set up a requested meeting time, location and more, which is then automatically added to their calendar.
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Genee co-founders Charles Lee and Ben Cheung. Genee will even send out the meeting invite on your behalf – freeing up your time. All those workers will now need to find a new scheduling app since Microsoft plans to shut down the service at the start of next month. “In the USA alone, there are 87 million knowledge workers who spend almost five hours per week scheduling meetings”, Stirman wrote. The duo describes Microsoft as “the leader in personal and enterprise productivity, AI, and virtual assistant technologies” and look forward to joining “a team that is committed to delivering cutting-edge language and intelligence services”. The only silver lining is that existing calendar entries created by Genee will remain.
