one of Microsoft campus buildings
Microsoft
has acquired Gene, a
startup that provided a virtual assistant for scheduling appointments.
The deal,
announced Tuesday, will bring the Genee team into the Microsoft fold and put
them to work on bringing intelligence into Office 365. Genee's service let
users loop in an artificial intelligence assistant that could interpret
sentences like "set up lunch at some point this week" and turn them
into calendar appointments.
Acquiring
Genee is part of Microsoft's ongoing crusade to build intelligent productivity
software and services using AI. The company has focused on that area under the
tenure of CEO Satya Nadella, with features like Office Delve, which finds
documents shared within an organization that are relevant to a user, and
Focused Inbox in Outlook, which filters unimportant email into a separate tab
so it's not cluttering a user's experience.
The Genee service will be shutting down on Sept. 1 as part of the
deal. It's unclear whether the functionality from the assistant will be making
its way directly into Office 365, or if the team behind Genee will just be put
to work improving a variety of Microsoft's products.
It would
make sense for that sort of natural language scheduling capability to make its
way into Outlook, as well as into Cortana, the virtual assistant that Microsoft
has been aggressively pushing people to use on a variety of platforms. Genee's
goal of giving intelligent assistants to people who don't have human assistants
meshes well with what Microsoft is doing.
This all
plays into Satya Nadella's ongoing strategy of aggressively acquiring companies
to shore up Microsoft's capabilities and growth areas. The firm has had a
number of high-profile acquisitions this year, including purchases of app
development platform Xamarin, intelligent smartphone keyboard SwiftKey, and ablockbuster
agreement to acquire LinkedInfor more than US$26 billion.
The
purchase price of Genee was not disclosed.
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