Google is rolling out a basic version of Vids to everyone. Until now, the AI-powered video editor has only been available to Google Workspace or AI plan subscribers, but now users can broadly access the app with templates, stock media, and a “subset of AI capabilities,” product director Vishnu Sivaji tells The Verge.
Launched last year, Vids is the newest addition to Google’s suite of Workspace tools. It’s geared toward helping you quickly pull together video presentations with a host of AI video editing and creation tools, including a feature to help you create a storyboard with suggested scenes, stock images, and background music.
Though Sivaji notes that the pared-down version of Vids will come with “pretty much all of the amazing capabilities” within the app, the free version doesn’t have any of the new AI-powered features rolling out today, including the ability to have an AI-generated avatar to deliver a message on your behalf.
With this update, you can select one of 12 pre-made avatars, each of which has a different appearance and voice, and then add your script. For now, you can’t use Vids to create an AI-generated avatar of yourself, which is a feature Zoom currently offers (and is apparently something tech CEOs are super into). When asked about this possibility, Sivaji said Google doesn’t “have any further updates to share” right now.
Additionally, Google is building upon Vids’ existing video generation capabilities by letting you create 8-second videos that incorporate a specific image, such as a new product. And, if you choose to include a video of yourself in your presentation, you can now use an AI-powered tool that automatically removes filler words and pauses from your recording.
Google is betting that these features can help companies save time and money when it comes to producing product demos, training videos, or support content. “A 10-minute-long clip with real actors can take as long as six months, and it might be tens of thousands of dollars because of the amount of time it goes into writing the script, iterating on it, getting into the studio, actually recording it, and then editing it,” Sivaji said. “What we’re hearing from customers is that it allows them to dramatically scale how many people can make these kinds of videos and how often they can make them.”