Microsoft Corp. made another acquisition designed to make the software and services smarter. The company has announced its new possession of Artificial Intelligence powered scheduling tool Genee. The company will also be incorporating these capabilities in future versions of the office 365 cloud-based productivity suite.

Genee offers virtual personal assistant in two ways, first through email and second through messaging chatbots on Facebook, Twitter, Skype and through traditional SMS. Using natural language processing algorithms, Genee will understand the contents of the conversation. This could come into hands of Microsoft as the company is planning to enhance its virtual assistant Cortana which challenges Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now.

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Microsoft would be performing well at adding the AI capabilities to the Office 365 suite, and would make the Outlook service smarter. This bonds well with the recent Microsoft acquisition of the Sunrise calendar app. Sunrise Calendar app is more powerful and rich in its features which schedule automatically. This gives a significant advantage to Office 365.

Microsoft wants to create a niche in the Google’s Android dominated the market and Apple’s iOS. At this moment Enterprise and productivity apps, as well as services, are necessary for the Microsoft. It is reported that Genee will be shutting down on 1 September, but the existing calendar entries created will remain no change. The app doesn’t allow new users instead.

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“Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one. 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,” Microsoft mentioned in a blog post.

However, it is not mentioned on when Genee’s AI algorithms will be added to Microsoft apps. It is expected that the integrating will start with individual apps first.

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