Outlook’s new AI highlights help individuals plan for meetings

Microsoft today declared that it is amplifying Outlook with new AI-driven highlights. In the next couple of weeks (in North America in English), it will reveal a trio of highlights in Outlook on the web to speed up meeting prep, cleverly propose meetings, and prescribing meeting venues — all controlled by the new system declared last September.

“You’ve heard Office has been adding intelligent technology across the suite to help you stay ahead of threats and keep you in the flow of work,” product marketing manager Gabriel Valdez Malpartida wrote in a blog post. “We’ve also been working in Outlook to deliver intelligence that will help you stay organized and get things done.”

First on the list is Meeting Insights. On the eve of individuals’ next meeting, Outlook — utilizing Microsoft Graph, a developer platform that interfaces multiple services, devices, and products across Windows, Office 365, and Azure — will surface conceivably important records and notes. Post-meeting, it will compose documents shared in emails, SharePoint, and OneDrive, alongside messages traded about the meeting and content shared both amid and a short time later.

“The information is uniquely tailored, so people who are in the same meeting will not necessarily see the same recommendations,” Malpartida said.

Next up is Suggested answer with a meeting, which expands on Outlook’s current recommended answers highlight. (For the uninitiated, that is the handy tool that proposes three short, canned answers at the bottom of the compose window when individuals react in a thread.) Now Outlook recognizes when individuals have a purpose to get and automatically bubbles together a Schedule a meeting alternative. Tapping on it pulls up a meeting form prepopulated with information.

To empower Suggested answers (and by expansion Suggested answer with a meeting), head to the Settings menu inside Outlook, at that point View all Outlook settings > Mail > Compose and answer. Check the box next to Show recommended answers, select save, and individuals are brilliant.

Ultimately, there’s Smart time recommendations and Suggest areas. The previous proposes days and times when all participants are allowed to meet, while the last presents meeting spots — like conference rooms or cafes — tailored to individuals’ inclinations, alongside those spots’ locations, hours, and contact data.

“We aim to bring you features that will make a difference, so some of these features will show up only in Outlook on the web while we gather data on them and evaluate whether to bring them to other Outlook endpoints,” Malpartida added. “We hope these features help you save time and get things done faster.”

The updates follow on the heels of Microsoft’s refreshed Outlook for iOS, which features a new UI, app icon, and “sensory feedback”. Maybe uncoincidentally, they additionally come days after Google brought AMP for Email venture — an open source part of its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project that guarantees increasingly powerful and web-like email encounters — into general accessibility.