The secret sauce behind Verse, IBM said, is algorithms used to determine which messages are most important to you, which ones are from people and which ones are gray matter spam. It sounds a lot like Google’s “tabbed” approach to sorting email it launched last year. But unlike Google, Verse will attempt to decipher the people and organizations that matter the most to you.

Verse combines this smarts with an interface that brings together an email client, calendar, collaboration tools, video chat, and a social feed that includes Twitter and Facebook.

After IBM launches Verse it says it will add a personal assistant to the platform powered by Watson. The Watson personal assistant would allow you to dictate and send a message and have Watson send meeting invites to contacts to a scheduled meeting. Another example is that Watson would question you if an email you were sending had an undesired tone either unfriendly, uncertain or informal.

IBM joins a crowded list of new entrants trying to fix or make email more useful. One notable entrant is Facebook, which announced in November that it’s testing a services called Facebook At Work with a limited number of partners and will have an official launch later this year.

Facebook At Work allows you to connect via voice, video, and text chat with co-workers and professional contacts. Central to the service would be a Facebook business news feed centered on your company or a project which would be completely separated from your personal profile. Here you would be able to collaborate on documents and use a cloud storage service similar to Google Drive.

IBM and Facebook have parallel goals. But IBM’s solution is rooted in a more traditional inbox paradigm. Facebook is trying to exploit the popularity of social media and Facebook hoping people will find posting updates on work projects just as addictive as sharing cat videos.

IBM said it is opening up its Verse email service for trial use by individuals and business for free starting in March with a final release sometime this spring. The service, IBM said, will be free to individuals and small business, but corporate users will have to purchase a license based on number of users and data usage.

The finished version of Verse will be free for personal or small-business use, but larger companies will have to pay, depending on data usage and the number of users. No word on Facebook’s pricing for Facebook At Work.