USA TODAY International Edition
Microsoft buys AI assistant Genee
Microsoft has made yet another acquisition designed to retool the former software king into an enterprise solutions leader.
The Redmond, Wash.- based company announced Monday it was buying virtual- assistant start- up Genee for an undisclosed sum, according to blog posts by Microsoft and Genee executives. The move comes on the heels of Microsoft’s $ 26 billion purchase of professional networking site LinkedIn, a bold move by CEO Satya Nadella as he aims to make his company’s cloud- based Office 365 platform ubiquitous in the business environment.
Genee makes software that uses artificial intelligence to schedule appointments. Emailing a contact and copying Genee causes the software to interpret the sender’s meeting request, search through the sender’s calendar and suggest a few meeting times to the recipient.
“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,” wrote Rajesh Jha, Microsoft’s corporate vice president in charge of Outlook and Office 365.
The Mountain View, Calif., company was founded in 2014 by Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, who raised $ 1.4 million from investors, according to Crunchbase. Cheung and Lee, who will join Microsoft and report to Jha, noted in their post Genee’s private and public beta will shut down Sept. 1 as the company moves under Microsoft’s umbrella.
“We look forward to bringing our passion and expertise to a team that is committed to delivering cutting- edge language and intelligence services,” the two executives wrote.