You Can Now Star in Your Own AI Videos Using Google Vids

Google is getting into the “star in your own AI-made videos without the need for a camera” game. The tech company said on Thursday that two new updates to Google Vids, its AI video creation tool, will let you star in your own videos, which you can now create with a typed prompt.

Personal avatars are the first new feature I am referring to, and all you need to create a custom digital avatar of yourself — which will look and sound just like you — is to submit a selfie and a voice recording. The second update is the introduction of Google’s AI model Gemini Omni to Google Vids.

Together, these updates will let you create your own custom videos with a simple prompt and any reference photos you upload, bringing your vision to life. Omni mashes these inputs together, and the result is that personalized AI video you’ve been dreaming of.

You can do small tweaks to your content by adding a different background, adjusting the lighting in the video and adding a bunch of other post-production effects to make your Google Vid pop.

And if you make an error, Omni lets you go step by step through your video edits to streamline the process. That’s a nice update compared to the old way of scrapping an entire project and starting from scratch.

The days of Google Vids as an AI-assisted workplace tool are over, as these updates evolve the platform into a full-fledged video creation tool. Vids is now part of Google Workspace, so you can use it to create videos that align with your business’s communication materials (think onboarding videos). 

Personal avatars help make this content more, well, personalized and conversational, which may further engage the viewer. 

It’s not the first tool of its kind (see HeyGen and Synthesia as examples of what’s already out there), but having Google’s name associated with this kind of AI-assisted video creation will likely spark significant competition.

For transparency’s sake, the AI-generated content created here will include an invisible SynthID watermark, letting people know it was generated by AI and is not representative of real life. As for the new personal avatars feature, these images will be tied to a person’s Google account and will be available only to people in certain regions who are 18 or older.

A Google spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.