At its Ignite 2022 event today, Microsoft has unveiled a bunch of tools for creators. The biggest announcement is its new Designer app. While we already had a pretty good idea of what the new app was about from previous leaks which included several different images, the official announcement confirms some of those expectations and rumors.
Designer is a graphic design app in Microsoft 365 that will help users create social media posts, invitations, digital postcards in a fly as it will powered by OpenAI"s DALL.E 2, among others. Basically the company says Designer is PowerPoint on steroids where the AI does most of the heavy lifting. With its help, users can expect over eight billion AI-generated slide designs.
Microsoft has confirmed that Designer integration is coming to Edge as well. The free web preview is available at this link starting today. Since it is driven by AI, the app is expected to get better over time.
While we are on the topic of AI-generated images, Microsoft is also bringing a new "Image Creator from Microsoft Bing" feature that is similar to Designer, except his will be in Bing and help create completely new images. It will be a gradual rollout and once available, users can access the feature via the Images tab in Bing (https://www.bing.com/create) or via the Image Creator icon on the sidebar in Edge.
Up next, we have an announcement related to Clipchamp, Microsoft"s inbox video editor. The tool is now a part of the Microsoft 365 family of apps and will help complement Designer when video editing tasks are involved. As a reminder, premium Clipchamp features are now available to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers and Clipchamp Essentials subscribers.
Microsoft has also launched a new "Microsoft Create" website. The Redmond company describes it as the "ultimate creator launchpad" for creating videos, graphic designs, documents, presentations, and more. Essentially, the Create website will provide a curated list of various articles, videos, templates and more, from similar creators that will help guide new users.