Microsoft updates Teams with communities and AI-powered Designer support

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Microsoft Corp. is updating the free version of its Teams app built into Windows 11 with big improvements including support for Designer, the company’s artificial intelligence-powered art creation tool.

Teams is a messaging and videoconferencing app that competes with business-oriented collaboration and messaging service Slack. Microsoft launched communities in December in a bid to allow families, friends and businesses a more informal way to plan out meetings and events in the app, but that has been limited to mobile on Android and iOS. That feature is expanding to Windows 11 in preview now.

“On Windows 11, community owners can create communities from scratch, share and invite members, create and host events, moderate content with critical trust and safety features, and get notified about all important activities,” Amit Fulay, vice president of Microsoft Teams, said in an announcement Thursday. “Support for communities in Teams on Windows 10 and macOS devices, as well as web, is also coming soon.”

Community owners will be able to set their groups to be visible to other users in the coming days based on different topics such as parenting, gaming, gardening, technology, and more. Community owners will be able to approve or reject requests to join their community and set the visibility of their community for discoverability on Teams.

With a new capture experience, community users can also now record and share videos directly from the app on mobile. This includes a host of filters for videos and photos.

Generative AI integration with Microsoft Designer

Finally, the free version of Teams for Windows 11 is getting the AI treatment with a preview integration of Microsoft Designer. It’s a generative AI combined with an art canvas that allows users to use text prompts to describe what they want and it creates artwork for social media posts, invitations and other visuals. Using the tool, users would be able to quickly mock up anything that they want and collaborate with their friends, family and colleagues.

Designer uses OpenAI LP’s DALL-E 2 under the hood to produce images from text written by users, or uploaded images to seed its designs. When publishing an announcement post, users need only type a prompt into Designer and it will produce a series of potential visuals to go with their message.

Microsoft has continued to integrate image generation into its products, including adding Designer to its Edge browser, and last month the OpenAI-powered Bing Image Creator tool was added to the company’s Bing Chat search. The new tool allows users to use create images from simple text prompts.

Image: Microsoft