OpenAI’s Sora may have been shut down, but Google apparently believes there’s still interest in a tool that lets you star in your own AI videos. On Thursday, the tech giant announced updates to Google Vids. This allows you to create a custom digital avatar that looks and sounds like you, based on the selfies and audio recordings you upload.
Additionally, Google announced that it is bringing its multimodal AI model Gemini Omni to Vids, allowing users to create videos by combining written prompts with uploaded reference images. Omni mixes these inputs to create the AI video you want. You can also use it to replace the background, fix the lighting of videos recorded with your phone, and add effects.
Additionally, Omni now supports incremental editing. This means you can make changes to your video mid-stream instead of starting over.
With this update, Google Vids has evolved beyond its original role as an AI-assisted workplace presentation tool to become more of an all-in-one video creation platform. By making Vids part of Google Workspace, the company is promoting the use of Vids as a business tool for things like company updates and training videos, but personalized avatars and conversation editing could increase competition from other AI video startups and tools like HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions, and D-ID.
Google says the new AI avatars will be associated with the account holder’s likeness and their Google account, and will be invisibly watermarked with SynthID. (I guess that means no one is going to use the tool to create weird AI videos of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was making users do when Sora was available.)
The company also said that access to personal avatars is limited to users 18 and older in certain regions.
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