How to Painlessly Schedule Calendar Meetings Using Cortana

Nobody likes meetings, especially poorly scheduled ones.

Smart meeting schedulers 5 Calendar management and scheduling tools for the year 5 Calendar management and scheduling tools for the year Stay on top of everything on your agenda. Here are five free tools that can be particularly helpful in keeping your calendar in order. Read More But now, there is a better solution using Microsoft's artificial intelligence.

Calendar.help is a new tool that Cortana uses to schedule meetings with people outside of your company. Calendar.help is the brains of the operation, while Cortana is the "human-like" interface for the personal touch with its penchant for conversational assistance.

How does Calendar.help schedule a meeting??

Calendar.help works with Office 365, Outlook.com, and Google Calendar. Cortana handles messaging back and forth between meeting participants, while artificial intelligence works in the background to locate the right meeting at the right time.

Just a little catch: To use Calendar.help, you'll need to sign up for the preview waitlist with your work email. Calendar.help looks at your calendar and sees if you are an ideal candidate for the program. Then you can go to work and leave the meeting decisions to the artificial brain.

1. Write the first email. Send the first email to your contacts. CC only:Cortana in mail.
2. Give Cortana instructions once.. Tell him more about the meeting such as the length of the meeting. Thanks to natural language processing capabilities, you can speak in full sentences. For example, you can say it. “let's make this 90 minutes” or “Make this a Skype meeting”.
3. Or use the default preferences instead. Cortana can also use default preferences that you set up in advance for all meetings.
4. Send the mail. Cortana uses her calendar to find the right time and suggests at least three time slots for the participants. Cortana handles all email back and forth with other people and doesn't clutter your inbox. This exchange continues until the right time is found that works for everyone. Cortana also follows up with attendees if they don't respond within 48 hours.
5. Meeting is scheduled. With the date, time, and other details confirmed, Cortana creates an event on your calendar and sends the final invite to everyone.
6. Prepare for the meeting. You can check the status of the meeting at any time with an email to Cortana.

Thanks to the natural language used by Cortana, she feels like a real-life assistant. Calendar.help takes care of the mundane, leaving you time to focus on the nitty-gritty details of the meeting.

What are your first impressions? Do you use any smart scheduler for your meetings?