B (99:08)
Yeah, I saw this story on the tech community blog that Microsoft has about Microsoft Designer being integrated into. It's so vague the way they said this like Photos and the Microsoft 365 copilot app. And I was like really? What does that mean? Right? So if you open the Photos app in Windows 11 and probably Windows 10 has been adding these AI editing features for some time now. So if you open a. I got a. Geez, every time I open my. Open this on a new computer, it's like, I've never opened Photos in my entire life. Anyway, if I open a photo in Photos, for example, and you go to Edit, you will see these little icons up in the toolbar that are AI related, right? So they have like background, like Generative Erase. They have background removal and background blur and all that kind of stuff. And okay, like, cool. So I'm like, what is. I'm like, okay, so obviously these are the, you know, Designer as sort of the, the newish brand, if you will, for Microsoft's generative AI, you know, image capabilities. Right. What used to be being Image Creator, although it's actually still being image created too for some reason, but whatever. But actually they have integrated Designer into Photos. So if you haven't done this, and I don't know if you have to. Let me see if it's on this computer. Yeah, so if you go to edit an image, one of the buttons now at the top is Edit with Designer. And that actually loads a version of the Microsoft Designer web app inside of Photos and lets you access actually some of the same features but a bunch of other new features, including things like selective edit, you know, like auto enhance, etc. Background removal, removal and replace. They don't call it that, but basically you're replacing the background with some other image or with a color. There's a bunch of stuff like that. You can use generative AI capabilities to create images or stickers or icons or whatever and add them to an image. And it's part of, of a whole design process. So. Huh. Like I, I actually didn't. I mean, I sort of knew the button was there, but I never even saw that before. So that actually is the thing. As for the Microsoft 365 copilot app, I think, yeah, last week I did an episode about that for Hands on Windows that will be out next week or the week after. I don't know what the schedule is, but it is interesting to me that right now there are two Copilot apps in Windows and one of them is Copilot, obviously the basic Chatbot, you know, AI Assistant, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the other one is what used to be the Microsoft 365 app. So if you open that up as a consumer, God help you because you'll never get rid of it. It will keep coming up. It will auto Start with Windows. I actually. Sorry, I just did it myself. It's the Microsoft 365 app with two changes. There's a Copilot button in the sidebar, which, as a consumer doesn't do anything yet. It will, right? It says Copilot Chat is coming soon. There's a Create tab now, which is just a front end to all of the individual apps. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. And they've added Designer and, by the way, Clipchamp to that list. Also Sway. Interestingly, you might have thought that went away and some other things. So instead of having the apps in the sidebar, which you can actually still see, you can just. This is like a Microsoft Works type thing. Like just, you know, there's a front end for all this stuff. It will launch the appropriate app. If you have the app on your computer, it launches that app pretty good. If you sign in with a Microsoft worker school account, this app actually is kind of transformed. They got rid of all the app shortcuts. They use Create as the front end for all that stuff. And that Copilot tab does something. It actually gives you a Copilot Chat experience very much like the Copilot app, the standalone app, except that your company could, if they wanted to, well, turn it off or limit its knowledge base to corporate information. Right. And so this is the reason they have the two apps. They. This app can be locked down and I don't have it on in front of me, but when you sign in with a worker school account, it actually has a little green icon in the corner that tells you that everything that's happening here is data protected by Microsoft, you know, support the commercial customers. Why did I just tell you this? Well, the Designer integration with the Copilot365 app, which used to be the Microsoft365 app, which used to be the Office Apple, does not apply to the version of Windows that's the one on mobile. So if you have Designer on Android. Not Designer, sorry, if you have the Microsoft 365 copilot app on your phone, which you might, because it used to be called something that made sense to you, you should go look, by the way, they changed the name. So Designer is actually integrated into that in the same way that it is on Windows in the Photos app. So when you click the Designer tab, which is actually at the bottom, not on the side on the phone, or actually the Crate tab rather, and then go to Designer from there, you actually get the Designer experience inside of the app. So if you're familiar with how the Office app used to be or the Microsoft 365 app. You know that Microsoft still does, but used to only have individual apps for like Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Right. But then they had the Office app that had all that stuff inside of it. That's what they're doing with Designer as well. So if for some reason you use Designer, I shouldn't say that I use it for image creation for my, like my web articles. But it's really supposed to be a standalone competitor to like Canva or Adobe Express, where it boggles my mind that there might be professional designers that we use tools like this. But I guess there are. You know, if you want to make a pamphlet is kind of a stretch in 2025, but you're trying to make logos maybe or things that will appear over social media posts, whatever it might be. All of these solutions are for that reason. So I guess if you're out in the world on your phone, there is, I should say a standalone Designer app. But if you wanted all of those Microsoft capabilities across Word, Excel, et cetera, but just in one app, that's what the Microsoft 365 copilot app is now. And yes, I have a heart. I threw up in my mouth a little bit there just saying that.
