Microsoft Bing gets a free Sora-powered AI video generator

Microsoft Bing announced today that it is introducing the Bing Video Creator to its app, which uses OpenAI’s Sora model to let users generate videos from text prompts.

OpenAI, which has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, has locked down access to Sora‘s video generation for paying customers only. Its integration in Microsoft Bing represents the first time that it will be available for free.

At launch, Bing Video Creator is not yet available on desktop, and videos can take hours to generate, even when using the “fast” mode, which is supposed to take just a few minutes.

All users, so long as they are logged into a Microsoft account, can use the Bing app to create ten video clips at no cost. Then, users have to pay 100 Microsoft Rewards points per video. These points are awarded from searching with Bing or making purchases at the Microsoft Store — for example, 5 points are awarded for each PC search using Bing, with a cap at 150 points per day.

Users can queue up to three five-second video generations at a time — as of now, there’s no way to change the length of the video. So far, videos can only be generated in a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio, perhaps priming users to share their AI creations on TikTok or Instagram. But soon, horizontal 9:16 uploads will be available as well.