Generative AI is supposed to help people do their jobs faster and better, rather than just flat-out replace employees. An example of that kind of assistance debuted today on the Microsoft Teams collaboration service with the launch of the Typeface AI app.
The app comes from the Typeface startup company, which first revealed itself to the public in February 2023. Its founder and CEO is Abhay Parasnis, who previously worked at Adobe as its chief technology officer.
Typeface’s goal is to “empower businesses to securely create exceptional, brand-personalized content faster and easier than ever before” according to its website. Today, Microsoft and Typeface jointly announced the new Typeface AI app for Teams that is supposed to do exactly that.
In a post on the Microsoft Teams blog, the company offers an overview of the new Typeface AI app:
It uses the powerful combination of Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI Service, and Typeface’s brand-personalized AI to create content significantly faster than humans can, allowing companies to scale marketing efforts and produce a range of assets such as creative briefs, email campaigns, multimedia online ads, and more. And it all happens in Teams, where chats provide the business context and collaborative capabilities users need without switching apps.
Businesses can train the Typeface AI app, using the company’s Affinity AI mode, to help create marketing content for them by adding product info, style guidelines, images, and more. They can then generate new branded content with the assistance of the app. The blog offers an example of how this would work:
Imagine you’re a marketing manager starting a social media campaign to promote a new line of apple drinks from a consumer goods brand. In Typeface, you can quickly generate a caption and an image at once, customized for a specific target audience. In less than a minute, Typeface produces personalized results that can be brought into a variety of social media platforms
The integration of the Typeface AI app in Teams includes some features that are exclusive to Microsoft’s service. It can allow individual users to make content by themselves, which can then be shared among their other Team members. It can also use message extensions so that content shared in Teams can be accessed by the Typeface AI app.
Microsoft Teams for Business users can get the app by going to the Apps option on the left hand menu. They can search search for “Typeface” and when they find it they just have to click on “Add” to get the app.
Typeface plans to expand its app to other Microsoft Office software like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel sometime in the near future.