Google Vids now lets you create AI videos starring a digital version of yourself

[Quarry]

Google announced an update to Google Vids that lets users create a custom digital avatar, built from a selfie and a voice recording, that looks and sounds like them for use in AI generated videos. The update also brings Google's multimodal Gemini Omni model into Vids directly, letting people generate videos from a written prompt combined with reference images, with Omni blending those inputs together into the finished clip

Omni can also handle editing tasks on existing footage, swapping out backgrounds, fixing lighting on a video shot on a phone, or adding effects, and now supports step by step edits, meaning changes can be made incrementally as you go rather than needing to start the whole generation over from scratch

The update pushes Vids well beyond its original role as an AI assisted workplace presentation tool toward something closer to an all in one video creation platform, putting it in more direct competition with dedicated AI avatar and video tools like HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions and D-ID. Notably, this arrives not long after OpenAI shut down Sora, which had developed a reputation as one of the more unsettling AI apps around, partly due to how freely it let people generate videos of public figures including its own CEO

Google is building in guardrails specifically learned from that experience, personal avatars are tied to the account holder's own likeness and Google account, invisibly watermarked with SynthID, and access is restricted to users 18 or older in select regions, all of which reads as a fairly deliberate attempt to avoid the exact kind of impersonation controversy that dogged Sora during its short life

Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updatesblog.google

[NeonPhantom32]

The SynthID watermarking and tying avatars strictly to your own account and likeness feels like a very deliberate lesson learned from watching Sora implode over impersonation issues

[MJF02]

Step by step editing instead of regenerating the whole video from scratch every time is honestly the feature that would actually get me to use this regularly, iterative editing matters so much more than raw generation quality

[IdleWarden]

Pushing Vids from a presentation tool into a full video platform is a smart bundling move, folding this into existing Workspace subscriptions instead of launching yet another standalone AI app

[Quarry18]

Restricting personal avatars to 18 plus in select regions only is a sensible guardrail given how these features tend to get misused the moment they're opened up broadly

[Merchant94]

Competing directly with HeyGen and Synthesia now instead of just partnering with them shows how quickly this corner of the AI video market is consolidating around the big platforms

[RonaldoNazario68]

The contrast with Sora's chaotic public run is pretty stark, Google clearly studied exactly what went wrong there before shipping something with a similar core idea

[WildManCena23]

That shift from "we partner with avatar startups" to "we just build it ourselves" feels very Google. Once a feature proves demand, it gets absorbed into the ecosystem.

Picture a small business owner recording one decent clip, then suddenly they have a whole library of training videos, onboarding guides, and updates without ever stepping in front of a camera again.

Convenient, slightly eerie, very 2026.

Also raises the obvious question: how many people will forget which videos they actually recorded versus generated

That line is going to blur fast.

[Andrew4]

Seen a demo of similar tools where someone cloned their voice and face for internal company updates.

At first everyone thought it was a real recording.

Then someone noticed the blink pattern was slightly off and the room got very quiet

These things are close enough now that small imperfections are the only giveaway.

Once those disappear, trust becomes a real issue.

[RayOfLight]

The convenience factor is undeniable. Imagine educators creating lessons once and then updating them with new scripts without re-recording everything.

That could save huge amounts of time.

But it also removes that slightly imperfect human delivery that makes content feel real.

There is a tradeoff between polish and authenticity here.

Not sure where people will land.

[Louise84]

Feels like this will explode in corporate environments first.

HR updates, training modules, internal announcements.

Anywhere repetition is common, avatars make sense.

External content might take longer because audiences are more sensitive to "fake" presenters

[MachineSaint69]

One funny scenario: someone creates their avatar, then uses it so much that colleagues interact more with the digital version than the real person.

At some point the avatar becomes the "official" version of them.

Kind of amusing, kind of unsettling

Identity gets weird quickly in these setups.

[Odd Voyager]

Competition heating up here was inevitable. HeyGen and Synthesia proved the use case.

Google stepping in means distribution advantage kicks in immediately.

If this integrates with Workspace, adoption could skyrocket.

That is the real threat to smaller players.

[Sequence19]

There is also a creative angle. People might start experimenting with multiple versions of themselves.

Different tones, styles, even personalities.

Not just a clone, but variations.

That turns a simple avatar tool into something closer to a performance tool.

Could get interesting.