Google Vids: Custom AI Avatars for Your Videos

Google Vids: Custom AI Avatars for Your Videos

OpenAI may have shut down Sora, but Google believes there is still interest in a tool that allows you to star in your own AI videos. On Thursday, the tech giant announced an update to Google Vids that will enable you to create a custom digital avatar that looks and sounds like you, based on a selfie and a voice recording that you upload.

Additionally, Google stated that it is integrating its multimodal AI model Gemini Omni into Vids, allowing you to create videos using a combination of written text and reference images that you upload. Omni then blends these elements to create the AI video you desire. It can also be used for tasks such as changing the background or correcting the lighting of a video recorded on your phone, or adding effects.

Furthermore, Omni now supports step-by-step edits, meaning you can make changes to your video as you go, rather than starting from scratch.

These updates propel Google Vids beyond its initial role as an AI-assisted presentation tool to become an all-in-one video creation platform. By integrating Vids into Google Workspace, the company signals its use as a professional tool for corporate updates or training videos, but the custom avatars and conversational edits could put it in closer competition with other AI video startups and tools like HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions, D-ID, and others.

Google specifies that the new AI avatars will be linked to the user's image, associated with their Google account, and invisibly marked with SynthID. (I assume this means that no one will be able to use the tool to create bizarre AI videos of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, as was allowed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with Sora when it was available!)

The company also indicates that access to personal avatars is limited to users in certain regions aged 18 and older.