Microsoft Introduces Two New Artificial Intelligence (AI) Based Tools, Microsoft Designer & Image Creator

With the introduction of DALLE-2-powered Microsoft Designer and an AI text-to-image model to its search engine Bing, Microsoft is introducing AI-generated art to its Office suite. The application functions similarly to AI text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, requiring users to write a text prompt that the program will use to generate an image. Microsoft Designer can “instantly generate” a variety of “consistent, aligned, appropriately scaled, and stunning designs even with or without any natural design ability,” the company claims in a blog post. Furthermore, it is claimed that when Designer is available, there is no need to waste time creating cards or social media posts from scratch. Additionally, you are no longer required to look through countless premade layouts. 

Designer enables you to begin with a concept and delegate labor-intensive tasks to the AI. For instance, Designer’s “start from scratch” feature allows you to design something completely original by only describing the image you want to see. AI drives every surface of the app. At the same time, you work as Designer to assist consistent, aligned, appropriately scaled, and beautiful designs, whether or not you have any innate design talent. Based on Microsoft’s PowerPoint, the program allows users to construct presentations and their creations from scratch using text prompts. The company stated that AI would present customers with new “design concepts” for their expressions when they add more content, such as images or text, offering them various options. The app has only some of the anticipated features available in its free web preview version, which was released as early access.

Microsoft also said that when Microsoft Designer is ready for a full launch, it would be offered as a standalone, free app and a version with greater features that is only accessible to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users. In addition to announcing Microsoft Designer, the firm also disclosed that Bing, its search engine, will now feature an AI text-to-image model. Microsoft claims that the Image Creator tool will enable users to create images that do not currently exist; however, little is known about it. Microsoft gave the situation of users searching for photographs online and not being able to discover what they’re looking for as an illustration of how this functionality might be helpful.

To use this function, users “simply enter in a description of something, any additional context like location or activity, and an art style,” and then “Image Creator will produce it for you,” according to the blog post. Without the use of plug-ins, the built-in shopping features on Edge could help consumers save an average of $400 a year (as claimed by the organization). Additionally, Microsoft Edge has saved consumers more than $1.4 billion in coupon savings to date. Microsoft also made a $1 billion investment in the business in 2019, allowing the tech giant to use its text generator AI GPT-3 with an exclusive license. 

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