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Microsoft Teams Gets AI Powered Designer and Expanded Communities Support
Microsoft on Thursday announced new and updated features coming to its free version of Teams, including integration with its AI Designer tool.
The preview version of Microsoft Designer can now be accessed Teams on Windows 11. Powered by generative AI technology, Designer allows users to create unique and personalized designs by describing their vision or using uploaded images. The Teams-announced integration will allow users to create and post their AI-assisted designs from the service itself.
"By describing your idea’s vision in words or utilizing an uploaded image, you can create captivating one-of-a-kind visuals," wrote Microsoft in the announcement blog. "Simply create an announcement post in communities to design your own banner with Designer."
Microsoft Designer, which is powered by DALL-E AI technology, has been in public preview since October. This week's announcement marks the next integration for the image-creating technology, with support in Microsoft's Edge browser coming soon.
Microsoft also announced extended support for communities in its free version of Teams. Communities, the company's Discord-like feature, allows users to create and join community channels, which allows for group-wide communication and management under one channel. Users can also search and join communities based on specific topics (like gardening, running, car repair, etc.). Communities can be accessed from the Home tab on Teams.
The new Teams feature, which was announced in December and initially only released for Android and iOS users, is now available for Windows 11 Teams users. Support for Windows 10, macOS and Web users will be coming in the near future.
Along with additional support, Microsoft said it is improving the controls by a community owner. Per Microsoft:
Owners can now approve or reject requests to join their community and assign owner controls to others in their community. We added an option to share posts as emails so owners can easily reach members even if they’re not using Teams every day. Lastly, community owners can now easily gather consensus from community members with Polls, powered by MSForms.
Further, community members will now be able to record and post videos from their mobile devices that take advantage of new markup and filter tools.
Finally, Microsoft announced on Thursday an update to GroupMe, the company's mobile group messaging service acquired during Skype acquisition in 2011. GroupMe will now feature support for Microsoft Teams calling, allowing users to create Teams calls directly within their GroupMe chats and participate in group video calls.