Microsoft is bringing AI-generated art to its Office suite with the launch of DALLE-2-powered Microsoft Designer and adding an AI text-to-image model to its search engine Bing.
Microsoft has announced the launch of its new graphic design app, Microsoft Designer, which is bringing AI-generated art to the Microsoft Office suite.
The application works in the same way as AI text-to-image models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, with users writing a text prompt that the program will use to generate an image. According to Microsoft's blog post, Microsoft Designer is able to "instantly generate" a variety of "consistent, aligned, properly scaled, and beautiful designs even with or without any inherent design ability."
The app is based on Microsoft's PowerPoint and gives users the ability to make their designs from scratch using text prompts as well as create presentations. The company noted that when users add more content like images or text to their presentations, AI will offer them more "design ideas" giving several options that users can choose from.
The app has launched in early access and currently offers a free web preview version of it which doesn't yet include all the planned features. The company invites people to try out this early version of the app asking for their feedback which is set to help the company "make it great."
Microsoft also added that as soon as Microsoft Designer is ready for the full launch, it will be available as both a standalone free app and a more feature-filled version available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.
In addition to the Microsoft Designer announcement, the company also revealed that it is adding an AI text-to-image model to its search engine Bing. The feature is called Image Creator and while little is known about it, Microsoft claims that it will help users create images that do not yet exist. As an example, Microsoft said that this feature could be useful when users search for images online and for some reason, can't find anything they want.
According to the blog post, to use this feature, users have to "simply type in a description of something, any additional context like location or activity, and an art style" and after that, "Image Creator will make it for you."
Both Microsoft Designer and Image Creator are powered by AI technology, including the AI system DALL-E 2 developed by OpenAI. Microsoft invested $1 billion into the company in 2019 which helped the tech giant have an exclusive license to use its text generator AI GPT-3. However, it is not clear if Microsoft has a similar license for using DALL-E.
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