Microsoft Corp. announced this week at its San Francisco artificial intelligence event a new incubation project code-named “Calendar.help.”

Calendar.help gives Cortana, Microsoft’s personal digital assistant, the ability to schedule your meetings using AI, conversational computing and calendaring. The new project, available in preview, uses Microsoft Research, Outlook, Cortana and Genee Inc., the scheduling AI startup, which Microsoft acquired in August.  

Users simply have to cc Cortana on an email and the digital assistant will take over the meeting scheduling.

How to get started with Calendar.help

Sign up for the preview waitlist at Calendar.help, once you have been accepted you can start using Cortana to schedule your meetings.

Write an email using your registered email address and Cc Cortana.

In your email, you can give Cortana instructions using natural language, including the length of the meeting (e.g. “let’s make this one 60 minutes”), timing (e.g. “sometime next week”) and location (“make this a Skype meeting”).

Alternatively, you can set up default preferences for Cortana in advance and the digital assistant will automatically use those without the need to provide additional commands in the email body.

Once you send your email, Cortana will take over the scheduling of the meeting. The digital assistant will check your Office 365, Outlook.com, or Google calendar to find available times and then communicate directly with the meeting attendees (none of these back and forth emails will appear in your inbox) with proposed time options.

Attendees will reply to Cortana with their availability, which will continue until a suitable time is found for all attendees.

Note: If attendees don’t respond within 48 hours, Cortana will follow up with them.  

Once a date and time is finalized for the meeting, Cortana will schedule it in your calendar and send the details to all meeting attendees.

Images via Microsoft