Google Vids adds AI avatar and Gemini Omni video features
Original: Google Vids now lets you star in your own AI videos
Why This Matters
Google Vids' expansion signals enterprise AI video creation is becoming a competitive mainstream market.
Google announced on July 16, 2026, that Google Vids will allow users to create personalized AI avatars based on a selfie and voice recording, and introduced Gemini Omni integration for prompt-and-image-based video generation, expanding Vids into a full video creation platform.
Google has announced two major updates to Google Vids, its AI-assisted video creation tool within Google Workspace. First, users can now generate a custom digital avatar that replicates their appearance and voice by uploading a selfie and a voice recording. These avatars are tied to the user's Google account, restricted to users aged 18 or older in eligible regions, and watermarked invisibly using Google's SynthID technology. Second, Google is integrating its multimodal model Gemini Omni into Vids, enabling video generation from a combination of written prompts and reference images. Omni also supports background swapping, lighting correction, and special effects for phone-recorded footage, as well as step-by-step iterative editing. The updates shift Google Vids beyond its original role as a workplace presentation tool, positioning it as a broader AI video creation platform. By embedding these capabilities in Google Workspace, Google is targeting business use cases such as company updates and training videos, while also entering more direct competition with AI video startups including HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions, and D-ID.