Announced at Google Next 2024, Google Vids is a modern AI-powered workspace tool that aims to transform the way teams collaborate and share knowledge. Joining existing productivity solutions like Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, the new service will enable users to create engaging videos in just minutes, right from within their browser.
It's important to note that Google isn't promoting Vids as a solution for creating high-quality marketing videos or product demos. Rather, Google Vids is like Google Slides on steroids, meant for things like creating pitch decks, updating colleagues on presentations, or even creating onboarding content for new employees.
Here we'll take a closer look at what Google Vids is, what it can do, and how you can use it to create actionable, informative videos.
What is Google Vids? Basic Information
Introduced in April 2024, Google Vids is an AI-powered video creation app for modern teams. According to Google's announcement blog, the app builds on a range of tools the tech giant has already introduced to enhance how teams share knowledge, including Google Slides and Sheets.
Just like Spreadsheets, Docs, and Slides, you don't need any special equipment (or knowledge) to create content with Google Vids — all you need is a browser and a little inspiration.
Google says that users can create fun, interesting, and engaging videos in seconds, whether they're designing a training video, a sales pitch, or simply sharing an announcement with their team.What's more, like many of Google's Workspace tools, Vids will be powered by Google Gemini.
In fact, the video creation solution was introduced alongside other AI-focused updates to Workspace. At Google Next, Google also announced two commercial offerings that include solutions that bring AI to meetings, messaging, and security strategies.
Google Vids Features
Google says Vids is designed to help team members tell and share stories more effectively in the workplace. The tech giant believes video has become fundamental to how knowledge is shared in the modern workplace. After all, most people spend at least part of their week participating in video conferencing sessions or watching video content for training purposes.
But until now, it hasn't been that easy to create high-quality videos for things like sales briefings, event recaps, vendor outreach, etc. To simplify the process, Google designed Vids, which the company says is a one-stop video writing, production, and editing assistant.
Currently, features include:
- Style templates: It comes complete with 12 style templates (at launch), access to sample layouts, access to the Google Fonts library, and a drag-and-drop interface for adding media assets.
- collaboration: Share your videos with other editors and manage revisions in real time. You can also leave comments on the video, just like you would annotate a Google Slides presentation.
- Gemini AI: Gemini, the latest version of Google Workspace, allows you to create scripts for different video content and also compliment your videos with narration in different languages, dialects and accents.
- Integration: Users can add source documents (such as Slides or Docs) from Google Drive to help the AI assistant create new resources, and Gemini can add to content from its library of stock images and videos.
- edit: Google Vids can generate comprehensive storyboards that users can edit and adjust as needed. The video editing features are a bit basic (from what we've seen), but they're great for beginners.
Why did Google create Vids?
Judging by Google's demo videos so far and its announcement at Google Next 2024, Vids is useful but not necessarily revolutionary. It's basically what you'd expect to get when you turn Google Slides into a video-making app and add AI to it.
But what's notable is that that seems to be what Google was going for: The company wanted to give users a clean, familiar experience within Google Workspace. There are other tools that could offer a similar experience, like Loom and Descript, but Google is confident that Vids will be a popular choice because of its tight integration with the company's other productivity apps.
Just like Google Slides, you can gather assets from Google Drive and assemble them into a video, and you can add narration and other elements to make your video much more engaging than a simple recorded Google Meet session.
And the addition of Gemini AI definitely adds value. Even if you don't have video production expertise, you can let Google Assistant do almost all the work for you. Gemini can storyboard your videos, write scripts, and read the scripts aloud with text-to-speech. As a multimodal generative AI app, it can also create images to use in your videos.
An added benefit is that you can collaborate with your team in real time as you create content. Google Vids not only lets you share pre-created video files with your team members, but anyone you interact with as you create your content can edit the video, leave notes, add comments, and more.
How to use Google Vids in Workspace
Google is currently testing the new Vids app with a small group of users in its Workspace Labs community, but the service will be gradually rolled out to Workspace subscribers over the summer, so you should start seeing it in your toolkit soon.
Once you have access to Vids, using it is as easy as leveraging existing tools like Docs and Sheets. Simply open Google Vids from your Google Drive menu. Once open, Gemini will automatically prompt you and access your existing documents or resources to build a storyboard for your video.
Based on the prompts you enter, Gemini will suggest a narrative outline for your content. You can edit this to your liking to define the “style” and tone of your video before Gemini starts putting it all together. After the AI app has created a draft, you can review everything and change the media, music and narration if necessary.
And if you don't want to record it yourself, you can have Gemini write the script for you, choose the language and tone of the narration, or even record your own voice. Plus, you can enrich every scene with our library of stock music files, images, and existing video content.
Once you're done, you can share your Google Vid with your team members and ask them to add their own elements, comment on sections, or write notes.
The future of video collaboration with Google
Google Vids is just one example of how Google is working to transform the collaboration experience for modern teams, with countless updates to the Workspace suite and our AI-powered tools over the past year.
While Google Vids is still in the early stages of public rollout, Google says it's already starting to see trends emerge among early adopters. For example, many teams prefer to create short videos (under three minutes). Additionally, most teams seem to use the feature to create training videos, share updates, or simply celebrate company achievements.
Google Vids could have simply been a feature added to Google's existing tools (like Slides and Docs), but by rolling out the solution as a standalone tool, Google seems to be promoting it as an entirely new way to share information and drive employee engagement.
If your team already uses video to share announcements, train team members, and create effective presentations, Google Vids may be the perfect tool for you.
FAQ
Is Google Vids available now?
Google Vids will be rolling out to all users with an existing Workspace subscription starting in June 2024. You'll need a Workspace subscription to access the feature, but you won't have to pay extra unless you want to access advanced AI tools alongside Vids.
Are there plans to add more AI features to Vids?
Google hasn't released much information about upcoming features for Google Vids just yet, but the company said that we can expect to see a host of new AI-powered features in the coming months once the solution becomes “broadly available.”
Is Google Gemini free?
Google Gemini (basic version) is available for personal Google accounts or Google Workspace accounts. To access more advanced versions of Google Gemini, you will need to access a paid subscription.
