Today, Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, is released in public preview with an expanded set of features.
Announced in October, it’s a Canva-like web app that can create designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, drawings, and more to share on social media and other channels. It makes use of user-generated content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to craft designs, with drop-down menus and text boxes for added customization and customization.
Brian Rognier, general manager of Consumer 365 at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post published today.
Now the designer can create written captions and hashtags related to social media posts, providing many suggestions that users can choose from. It can also create animated images, complete with backgrounds and text transitions, powered by artificial intelligence.
New features coming to Microsoft’s AI tool.
In the future, Designer will get additional editing features, Microsoft says, including the ability to place an object in a specific place in a drawing and automatically fill the rest of the image. In the meantime, the upcoming “Erase” and “Replace Background” options will allow users to brush over objects, people, or backgrounds they didn’t intend to put in the drawing.
Designer will remain free during the preview period, Microsoft says — it’s available via the Designer website and in the Microsoft Edge browser through the sidebar. Once Designer is generally available, it will be included with Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and has “some” functionality that is free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft hasn’t provided more details.
In response to some legal questions that have arisen recently about AI-powered image creation systems, Microsoft says that users will have “full” use rights to market images they create using the designer and image creator. It’s unclear if this might change in the future, he believes, given the ongoing court battles involving OpenAI and other startups that market generative AI tools.