A week after Salesforce.com Inc. revamped the calendar in its email extension to help users manage their meetings more easily, Microsoft is moving into the scheduling automation space as well. The company today acquired a startup called Genee Inc. that has developed a chatbot for making business appointments.

Although Microsoft plans to shut down the service Sept. 1, the features could find their way into Office 265. The software is designed to be used mainly in situations where users doesn’t have access to the calendar of the contact they want to meet and can’t easily book a time slot as a result, or need to make plans with a large number of people quickly. Both tasks can require a considerable amount of time that busy knowledge workers don’t necessarily have. Genee speeds up the process by automating the back-and-forth communications involved in making appointments using natural language processing algorithms.

When a worker needs to schedule a new meeting, all they have to do is make sure that the software can access to their calendar and provide a simple instruction like “I want to book a call with Jeff next week.” Genee’s algorithms will identify exactly who the command refers to, find their email address in the user’s contact list and send out a message the available time slots. The recipient is then able to quickly pick the date that is most convenient for them. And if necessary, it’s possible to make the process even smoother by inputting additional information such as the desired location for a meet-up and its expected duration.

Genee co-founders Charles Lee and Ben Cheung told TechCrunch a year ago that the software attracted over 10,000 users during its beta trial, a number that has likely grown significantly since. With the service’s shutdown, all those workers will now need to find a new scheduling app. On the plus side, however, there’s a good chance that the software giant will make the chatbot’s capabilities available for its popular productivity applications.

Rajesh Jha, the head of Redmond’s Outlook and Office 365 groups, actively hinted at the possibility in a blog post he published on occasion of today’s acquisition. He didn’t specify whether Microsoft will make use of Genee in its current form or tap the startup’s expertise to implement new functionality from scratch, but both possibilities are encouraging for users. And from the company’s point of view, meanwhile, the deal ups the ante against rivals like Salesforce.com that are seeking to erode its dominance in the cloud-based productivity market.

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