Cortana may have stopped offering consumer services, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft's virtual assistant is pushing up the virtual daisies in some corner of the metaverse. Instead, she's got a new job, offering a natural language interface into Microsoft 365 services. One of those services is ideal for the new world of hybrid work, where we spend much of our time trying to schedule both physical and online meetings. With meetings needing to be coordinated across internal and external calendars, setting up the average meeting now takes anything up to 30 minutes. Each meeting you're trying to organize adds up to quite a bite out of the workday, a hefty distraction that takes you out of your workflow.

This allows the user to "buy back" their time, and ensure their schedules are properly maintained, while eliminating human error from the process. The top 3 features of Sidekick are Forward to schedule, Inbound Link, and Availability Management. Forward to schedule allows users to forward any email that is a meeting request and Sidekick handles the rest! Using ML and NLP, Sidekick gathers all of the relevant data about the meeting request, and then schedules it with all participants. An inbound link delivers a solution for users to share access with Sidekick via chatbot.

In this paper we present Meeting Bot, a reinforcement learning based conversational system that interacts with multiple users to schedule meetings. The system is able to interpret user utterences and map them to preferred time slots, which are then fed to a reinforcement learning (RL) system with the goal of converging on an agreeable time slot. The RL system is able to adapt to user preferences and environmental changes in meeting arrival rate while still scheduling effectively. Learning is performed via policy gradient with exploration, by utilizing an MLP as an approximator of the policy function. Results demonstrate that the system outperforms standard scheduling algorithms in terms of overall scheduling efficiency. Additionally, the system is able to adapt its strategy to situations when users consistently reject or accept meetings in certain slots (such as Friday afternoon versus Thursday morning), or when the meeting is called by members who are at a more senior designation.