Hate the song and dance involved in finding just the right time to hold a meeting? It's acquiring Genee, whose centerpiece is an AI-powered virtual assistant that helps you schedule events in sync with your itinerary. Email both a client and Genee while you're arranging a lunch meeting, for instance, and it'll let your contact know when you can make it. Just what Genee will do isn't clear, but it'll "accelerate intelligent experiences" in Office 365 -- as elsewhere, Microsoft wants to make AI a key part of your workday.

Microsoft has picked up another productivity app -- announcing the acquisition of AI-powered scheduling tool Genee. In a blog post today the software giant said it will be plugging Genee into its cloud productivity suite, Office 365. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. "As we continue to build new Office 365 productivity capabilities and services our customers value, I'm confident the Genee team will help us further our ambition to bring intelligence into every digital experience," writes Rajesh Jha, CVP of Outlook and Office 365. Genee launched in public beta a year ago, offering an end-to-end scheduling tool that integrates with calendar apps and email providers to take the strain out of arranging meetings.

Microsoft announced today that it acquired Genee, an AI-powered scheduling assistant bot that specializes in planning meetings for large groups or when organizers don't have direct access to the calendars of everyone involved. Genee's app is a chatbot accessible via an iPhone app, email, SMS, FB, Twitter or Skype, and it understands natural language input, so you can just text it the kind of event you want to schedule, when you want to happen and who you want to include, and it should theoretically output a proper meeting invite. The standalone service is going to be shut down on September 1, 2016, as a result of the acquisition. It originally debuted in August last year. Genee co-founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee explained in a blog post announcing the news that easing calendar entries created by the service will still function, but it won't create any new ones or send reminders or agendas related to upcoming events. The team also says they "consider Microsoft to be the leader in personal and enterprise productivity, AI, and virtual assistant technologies," hence their excitement about teaming up with Redmond.

It's been two and a half years since we let Genee out of the bottle. In our drive to deliver large productivity gains through intelligent scheduling coordination and optimization, we often found ourselves on the forefront of technology involving natural language processing, artificial intelligence (AI), and chat bots. We were extremely fortunate to find many who believed in the vision and supported us with their resources, talent, time, and advice along the way, which made Genee possible. Today, we are pleased to announce that Genee has signed an agreement to be acquired by Microsoft. A new beginning means the end of another.

A tweak to Siri's pronunciation of Barbra Streisand's name will be heading to Apple products soon. The US singer complained the virtual assistant was pronouncing her surname wrong. "I called the head of Apple, Tim Cook, and he delightfully agreed to have Siri change the pronunciation of my name, finally," she said on Weekend Edition. Streisand said the second syllable of her name should be pronounced with "a soft S, like sand on the beach". "So let's see if that happens, because I will be thrilled," Streisand told the US show on Saturday.

When we reviewed the Amazon Echo last year, we hailed it as the best home-based voice-controlled product at the consumer level. It's become even more versatile and powerful since then. It can control your home's smart lighting, lock your smart lock, play music, provide weather forecasts, order a pizza, and more. This affordable, always-on personal assistant can manage not only your home, but much of your digital life. It's so useful, we predicted many folks would want more than one Echo in their home.

At present, predictive analytics is the most used form of AI in enterprise and companies are focusing on innovation, patenting their AI developments at a faster rate than ever before. Join us as we explore the rise of artificial intelligence in six charts including the top investors in AI and the most used AI enterprise solutions. As of June 2016, artificial intelligence received 974m of funding. This year's funding is set to surpass 2015's total and CB Insights suggests that 200 AI-focused companies have raised nearly 1.5 billion in equity funding. AI isn't limited to the business sphere, in fact the personal robot market, including'care-bots', could reach 17.4bn by 2020.

Unsupervised learning, by contrast, is much harder. It is best thought of as a continuum between (a) the entire system being one gigantic, autonomous, self-learning machine and (b) solving certain problems within a much larger system that also involves humans and supervised learning techniques. For many enterprise solutions we are very close to (b). For personal assistants like Siri, we are a little closer to (a), but even in such applications true autonomous AI is still quite far away. Imagine the amount of human intervention that will need to happen on the back-end, or how many special cases must be handled by editors or trainers in teaching the system.

Stephanie Hay is the head of content strategy at Capital One and led the design team that created Capital One's Amazon Alexa skill earlier this year. People say them every day -- after the waiter delivers food, when finishing a customer service call or before launching a rocket into space. These two words are just fine in the context of real life, human-to-human interactions. They're also covered as a feedback loop in traditional UI design, where we can create a button that says "Done" or "Save" and know exactly to which touch point people are referring when they tap it. In human-to-robot interactions, however, that's where things get tricky.

Even if you haven't tried it, everyone knows about Siri, Apple's speech interpretation and recognition personal assistant. The bot is available at the touch of a button or voice activation to answer questions about tomorrow's weather or recommend a nearby coffee shop, all with its signature sassy style. Siri was just an apple in Alan Turing's eye when he developed a test in the 1950s to see if machines could think. This was a highly influential first step in the development of artificial intelligence, but when Apple wowed an auditorium of cheering spectators five years ago at its launch, Siri was one of the first technologies to set expectations for technologists and consumers about what they could actually do with these capabilities. Because of Siri and other computer assistants, consumers finally have their own notions of what A.I.-enabled technologies should be able to do.