Image credit: microsoft.com
Microsoft plans to introduce new creator and design tools as well as an AI image generator to “bridge the gap between productivity and creativity,” as announced in its blog last week.
The consumer tools will be part of the company’s Microsoft 365 family of apps and will also be integrated with the Edge browser and Bing search engine. These are designed to help users express themselves and ignite their imagination.
Microsoft noted that presently almost 20 million US consumers create and monetize their content online and that 39% of media hours consumed weekly is made up of user-generated content. The company aims to facilitate the creation and sharing of content.
Leading these tools is the first ever Microsoft Designer, a graphic design app powered by artificial intelligence, including the DALL-E 2 by Open AI.
While it helps you create postcards, invitations, social media posts, and other graphic designs, you can also prompt the app (like you do in today’s popular text-to-image AI image generators) to create something unique when you run out of fresh ideas.
Every other feature and function of Designer is guided and reinforced by AI so you can always come up with designs that are attractive, consistent, properly scaled, and aligned.
The Designer app has its roots in PowerPoint, and will now use AI to make template suggestions to assist you in crafting presentations. The app can tap on a database of eight billion slide designs to give you a wide range of presentation options suitable to your content.
Microsoft plans to integrate Designer into its Edge browser as well as its search engine Bing. This is meant to deliver AI-powered design suggestions to visually optimize social media posts and enhance other visual content, all without having to leave the browser window.
Another creator tool also within Microsoft 365 is Clipchamp. It is a video maker app designed to help you produce beautiful videos easily and quickly. You can put together video, sound, and effects and create a professional-grade video in no time.
The app is available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers while subscribers to Clipchamp Essentials get access to premium features. Clipchamp also comes as the inbox video editing app on Windows 11 and can likewise be accessed through the website clipchamp.com which requires signup.
Speaking of websites, Microsoft came up with just that through Microsoft Create, a website specifically for creators. It comes with all the new tools – Designer and Clipchamp – bundled with Microsoft favorites like PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and Forms.
Microsoft Create is meant to provide complete creativity and productivity platform giving users access not only to apps and tools but also to dozens of design templates, social media graphics, and other digital assets. The website is in its preview stage and Microsoft is inviting content creators to sign up for early access.
All these developments are the results of the rebranding of Microsoft Office into Microsoft 365 with the introduction of new apps and integrating them with the Office productivity apps which will now be under the 356 umbrella. The official switch will happen this November.
By January next year, Office apps built into Windows 10 and 11 and Office mobile apps for Android and iOS will get updated and have the new Microsoft 365 logo and branding.
