Microsoft Corp. is betting big on
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make the software and services smarter. The company
has announced the acquisition of AI powered scheduling tool Genee, and will be
integrating these capabilities in future versions of the Office 365 cloud based
productivity suite.
Before Microsoft swooped in, Genee
offered virtual personal assistant services in two ways, first through email
and second as messaging chatbots on SMS, Facebook, Twitter and Skype. For
example, if you may want to meet a friend for lunch sometime in the next few
days, all you need to do is mark Genee in “cc” in the mail you send to the
friend. Genee will detect that you need to find the time for the meeting, will
scan your calendar, and directly mail your friend with multiple time options. If
there are any updates to the calendar leading up to meeting time, Genee will
update all parties involved, automatically.
Genee uses natural language
processing algorithms to understand the contents of a conversation. And this
could come in very handy for Microsoft as it looks to enhance its virtual
assistant Cortana, which rivals Google’s Now and Apple’s Siri. Also, Microsoft
would do well to add the AI capabilities on to the Office 365 suite and make
the Outlook mail service smarter.
This ties in well with Microsoft’s
recent acquisition of the Sunrise Calendar app, a more powerful and feature
rich calendar app, with automatic scheduling features, which gives Office 365 a
big advantage. Enterprise and productivity apps as well as services are
critical for Microsoft as the company wants to create a niche for itself in a smartphone
market which is now undoubtedly dominated by Google Android and Apple iOS
platform.
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