Microsoft announced today that it has signed an agreement to purchase Genee, an “artificial intelligence-powered scheduling service”.
The Tech start-up was founded in 2014 to simplify the task of scheduling meetings. It acts as a virtual personal assistant, which, thanks to natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms, recognises meeting requests in a user’s outgoing email or text. It then sends the included recipients appropriate options, according to the user’s prior calendar engagements.
The new acquisition will add to the growing services of Microsoft’s Office 365, in order to create additional value for users of the popular Microsoft service.
The Microsoft press release stated:
“…I’m confident the Genee team will help us further our ambition to bring intelligence into every digital experience.”
Genee Co-founders, Ben Cheung and Charles Lee said about the deal on their blog:
“We consider Microsoft to be the leader in personal and enterprise productivity, AI, and virtual assistant technologies, so we look forward to bringing our passion and expertise to a team that is committed to delivering cutting-edge language and intelligence services.”
Genee will be fully integrated in Microsoft’s Office 365 service by the 1st of September. The start-ups own service will shut down at this time. However, already scheduled meetings will remain on user’s calendars.
Cheung and Lee thank their current supporters and customers:
“We thank all of you who participated in Genee’s private and public betas. The Genee team will take the valuable experiences and lessons that you taught us to Microsoft, where we’ll continue to build amazing next generation intelligent experiences.”
Katharina Fleiner 22/08/2016
