The free edition of Teams will soon include Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered tool for creating art.
To create graphics for presentations, posters, digital postcards, and more to share on social media and other platforms, Microsoft Teams users may now utilise Designer, a Canva-like tool, in preview mode on Windows 11. Designer utilises DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, and accepts text prompts or uploaded photos to generate ideas for designs using drop-down menus and text fields for additional customization and personalization.
Initially unveiled in October of last year, Designer is also accessible online and in the sidebar of Microsoft’s Edge browser. Microsoft announced new capabilities, such as advanced editing tools, are on the way. Other features, such as caption generation and animated images, were released in April.
Microsoft wants to sell Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions to pay for Designer in the long run, but it hasn’t specified a price point yet. Nonetheless, it has stated that certain of the tool’s features will continue to be free. Who knows which feature will be used?
Today’s upgrades to other Teams have much less to do with AI.
Users of GroupMe, Microsoft’s free group messaging tool, may now start calls for Teams from any group chat, whether it is brand-new or already in progress.
Additionally, Teams’ communities function, which enables users to connect, communicate, and work together in groups akin to Discord, is now enabled on Windows 11 as of this week (with macOS and Windows 10 compatibility to come down the line). Users of Windows 11 have access to the same features as Teams communities on other platforms, including the ability to build communities, host events, manage content, and receive notifications of forthcoming activities.
Teams users will soon be able to join communities centred on topics like parenting, gaming, gardening, technology, and remote work thanks to a new communities discovery tool coming to Windows 11, iOS, and Android in the coming days. (According to Microsoft, it is up to community owners on iOS and Android to make it possible for their communities to be found on Teams.) Owners have the option to create polls using MSForms, share posts as emails, accept or reject requests to join their communities, assign owner controls to other members of the group, and more.
Teams community members may now record videos from their mobile devices using a new capture interface with improved filters and markup tools, according to a linked update. Moreover, community managers can use their phone’s camera to scan and send out invitations using emails or phone numbers from internet documents, print directories, or other lists on iOS.
Teams continues to expand, greatly aided by trends towards remote and hybrid work, and a wealth of additional capabilities are now available. During 2021 and 2022, there were a nearly twofold increase in the number of daily active Teams users, from 145 million to 270 million.