(VIDEO) Google Vids Now Lets You Create a Personal AI Avatar to Star in Your Own Videos With Update

Google is rolling out a major overhaul to Google Vids, its video creation tool within Google Workspace, adding the ability for users to build a personal AI avatar of themselves along with a more powerful video generation and editing engine powered by the company's Gemini Omni model.

The update, announced Thursday, allows users to create a custom digital avatar that both looks and sounds like them, generated from a single selfie and a short voice recording. Once created, that avatar can be selected as a character within videos generated in Vids, effectively allowing someone to appear on screen delivering a script without ever stepping in front of a camera.

Justin Luk, a product manager at Google, described the update as a significant step forward for how people create video content. "Gemini Omni and personal avatars in Google Vids make video creation easier than ever," Luk said in a statement accompanying the announcement. "Now you can generate and edit high-quality clips using everyday language, and create a custom digital avatar to star in your videos."

The personal avatar feature is designed with specific safeguards intended to limit misuse. According to Google, avatars are tied directly to the account holder's own likeness, meaning the tool cannot be used to generate a video featuring someone else's face or voice without their direct involvement in creating that avatar. Access to the feature is also restricted to users 18 years of age or older in select regions, and every video generated using a personal avatar carries an invisible SynthID watermark, part of Google's broader effort to make AI-generated content identifiable at scale as concerns about deepfakes and synthetic media have grown across the industry.

Beyond personal avatars, the update brings Google's Gemini Omni model directly into Vids for the first time. Omni is a multimodal AI system capable of generating video from a combination of text prompts, reference images, sketches and voice recordings, first previewed publicly at Google's I/O developer conference in May. Within Vids, users can now describe the video clip they want in plain language and optionally attach reference images for greater control over the finished result, with Omni blending those inputs together to produce the requested footage.

The update also introduces conversational, step-by-step editing capabilities that represent a notable shift from how video editing tools have traditionally worked. Rather than manually adjusting a timeline or re-shooting footage to fix an issue, users can simply type out the change they want, such as adjusting the color grading, swapping out a background, improving lighting or restyling the overall visual look of a clip. According to Google, these editing tools work not only on AI-generated footage but also on video recorded using a phone, giving users a way to clean up or enhance real-world footage using the same conversational interface. Google said Omni's underlying model brings improvements in text rendering, physics and overall visual realism compared to earlier versions of its video generation technology.

The rollout is being staged across Google's various release tracks. For Rapid Release domains within Google Workspace, the update began rolling out Thursday, with visibility expected to reach all eligible users within roughly two weeks. Scheduled Release domains, which typically receive updates on a slower cadence, are set to begin their rollout on August 5. Administrators overseeing Workspace accounts retain the ability to manage or disable the personal avatar feature entirely through the Google Admin console, giving organizations control over whether the tool is available to their users at all.

Access to both Gemini Omni and personal avatars within Vids is currently limited to subscribers of Google's AI Pro and AI Ultra consumer plans, along with eligible Google Workspace business customers, meaning the features are not yet available to users on Google's free tier.

The expansion marks a significant shift in how Google positions Vids within its broader product lineup. The tool originally launched as a relatively straightforward AI-assisted presentation tool aimed at helping Workspace users put together polished workplace videos, such as company updates or internal announcements, without needing professional video production experience or equipment. With the addition of personal avatars and full generative video creation through Gemini Omni, Vids is now positioned as a more complete, all-in-one video creation platform capable of competing directly with a growing field of AI video startups.

That competitive field includes companies such as HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions and D-ID, each of which has built businesses around AI-generated avatars and synthetic video creation for business and marketing use cases. Google's move to fold similar capabilities directly into Workspace, a suite of productivity tools already used by millions of businesses and individual subscribers, could put pressure on some of those smaller, more specialized companies as Google offers comparable functionality bundled alongside tools many users already pay for.

The update also arrives at a notable moment for the broader AI video landscape. OpenAI's Sora app, an earlier entrant in the consumer AI video space that drew both fascination and criticism for how easily it could be used to generate realistic-looking synthetic videos of real people, shut down earlier this year after facing sustained backlash over its potential for misuse. Google's more restrictive approach to personal avatars, tying each generated avatar strictly to its creator's own verified likeness rather than allowing users to generate videos of other people, appears designed at least in part to avoid a similar controversy, particularly around the possibility of the tool being used to create unauthorized synthetic videos of public figures, including Google's own executives.

Gemini Omni itself was first introduced in a more limited form in May, when Google released an initial version called Gemini Omni Flash across the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube Shorts, with generated clips capped at 10 seconds. Thursday's expansion into Vids represents one of the broadest deployments yet of the underlying Omni technology, extending Google's push into AI-generated video beyond short-form social content and into the kind of longer, business-oriented video production that Vids was originally built to support.