• by Jess Nelson , August 22, 2016

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Genee on Monday, an email-powered virtual assistant that brings artificial intelligence to meeting scheduling.

Genee is a scheduling service that integrates directly with calendar and email applications, automating the organization process required in planning and scheduling meetings and events. When Cc’ed in an email, Genee instantly coordinates the best meeting times and dates for everyone included in the email. Genee will then automatically send out calendar invitations to further streamline the process. 

Microsoft plans to add Genee into Office 365, meaning that Outlook email users may soon have an easier way to schedule meetings with friends, colleagues, clients or prospects.

“Genee uses natural language processing and optimized decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one,” states Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president of Outlook and Office 365 at Microsoft, in a blog post announcing the news.

The co-founders of Genee, Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, plan to join the Microsoft team according to their own blog post.

“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,” states Cheung and Lee.

Genee’s standalone application will be shuttered on Sept. 1, but all existing calendar entries will remain in place.  

Genee was first founded in 2014 and launched in public beta the following summer. The financial details of the acquisition agreement were not disclosed.