Generative AI program Midjourney has issued V7 in alpha, marking its first new model in almost a year. Notable updates include personalization turned on by default, which users must first set up — a process Midjourney says takes 5 minutes — and can then toggle on or off at any time. Another new flagship feature, Draft Mode, lets users render lower resolution images at “half the cost and 10 times the speed,” according to Midjourney, emphasizing “it’s so fast that we change the prompt bar to a ‘conversational mode’ when you’re using it on Web.” Draft Mode also supports voice prompts.

To use the personalization mode, “you’ll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney ‘personalization’ profile, if you haven’t already,” writes TechCrunch, explaining that the profile “tunes the model to your individual visual preferences.” Users can toggle personalization off on Midjourney’s site or on its Discord server.

The other big upgrade, Draft Mode, supports voice prompts. “Tell it to swap out a cat with an owl or make it night time and it will automatically manipulate the prompt and start a new job,” Midjourney explains in an announcement. “Click ‘draft mode’ then the microphone button to enable ‘voice mode’ — where you can think out loud and let the images flow beneath you like liquid dreams.”

“‘Make this look more detailed, darker, lighter, more realistic, more kinetic, more vibrant,’ etc. are some of the instructions the user could provide through the new audio interface in response to generations to produce new, adjusted ones that better match their creative vision,” reports VentureBeat.

Emphasizing Draft Mode as an iteration tool, Midjourney says that while Draft images are lower quality than Standard Mode, “if you like something click ‘enhance’ or ‘vary’ on the image and it will re-render it at full quality.”

Midjourney CEO David Holz wrote in a post on X social that V7 is a “totally different architecture.”

V7 launches in two modes: Turbo and Relax. The Standard speed mode is still in development and expected to ship soon.

VentureBeat describes Midjourney as “the boot-strapped startup viewed by many AI power users as the ‘gold standard’ of AI image generation since its launch in 2022,” calling V7 as its “most advanced version,” and pointing users who want to try it to alpha.midjourney.com.

“Some new features aren’t yet available or up to snuff with the latest version,” suggests ZDNet, noting that “when upscaling, editing, or retexturing your image, the AI will fall back to version 6,” with improvements for Moodboards and SREF codes for style reference coming in future updates.