Microsoft's AI-powered design tool is now widely available in Edge – The Verge
By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Microsoft Designer, the company’s free AI-powered design tool, is now broadly available to Edge users in the US. This means you can access Designer from Edge’s sidebar, allowing you to generate designs without opening up a separate tab or program.
After launching Designer last year, Microsoft announced in April that it would build the tool into Edge. The integration lets you create a number of designs, such as social media posts, fliers, greeting cards, invitations, and more — all from Edge’s sidebar.
Once you enter a prompt, Designer’s AI will pull up a grid of suggested designs, complete with text and a photo. You can also tweak any of these designs to your liking, whether you want to swap out a photo, add an illustration, or change the font. The tool’s DALL-E-powered text-to-image generator also lets you create pictures that you can add to your design.
While all these features are already available within Microsoft’s standalone Designer app on the web, there’s a benefit to having all these tools bundled in Edge. The integration should make it easier to bring designs to an email, Facebook, or Instagram without having to flip through a bunch of windows. It could also help it compete with other free design tools, like Canva, which have already begun to add AI-powered features.
Microsoft Designer is still in preview, and it’s not clear when the company plans to release it fully. You can access the tool by updating Edge and then selecting the “plus” icon in the column on the far right side of your screen. From here, toggle on “Designer (Preview)” for it to appear in your sidebar.
Aside from the Designer’s integration into Edge, Microsoft also rolled out a few updates to Bing Chat in the browser. Now, you can ask the chatbot to perform more actions, like organizing tabs related to a specific topic or obtaining a password from a different browser.
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