Google Workspace has launched Vids, an AI-powered video creation app singularly designed for enterprise use cases.
Announced at this week’s Google Cloud Next, Vids joins Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides in the Workspace service, with full interoperability between the apps. It intends to support businesses in producing video for collaboration and productivity purposes—all within their browser rather than a separate platform.
Google stresses that it’s been designed with simplicity and ease of use in mind, with no prior experience or expertise with video production software being necessary. Example use cases Google highlights include developing a product pitch, updating your team, creating a training video, celebrating a team or coworker achievement, or breaking down a complex concept.
Aparna Pappu, Vice President and General Manager at Google Workspace, said:
Now, everyone can be a great storyteller through video with Google Vids, a new AI-powered video creation app for work. Vids is your video, writing, production, and editing assistant, all in one. It can generate a storyboard that you can easily edit, and after choosing a style, it pieces together your first draft with suggested scenes from stock videos, images, and background music.”
It works by allowing users to collect assets from either Google Drive or other storage locations and then assemble those assets in order. While this might sound like Google Slides or another presentation software, users are assembling those assets in a left-to-right video timeline. Users can then add voiceovers or film themselves and edit those assets into the final product.
Users can also prompt Google’s Gemini AI to produce a first draft of the video for them. Gemini can contribute to storyboarding, scripting, and text-to-speech narration. It also provides a library of stock video and audio elements, including myriad visual styles, background music, and preset voiceovers, for users to enhance their projects.
Once a video is created in Vids, users can share it with others. Similar to Google’s other productivity tools, sharing a Vid is an inherently collaborative process. Recipients can provide comments, leave notes, and edit the video content, fostering collaborative editing and feedback processes.
“Vids includes a simple, easy-to-use interface and the ability to collaborate and share projects securely from your browser. It’s an entirely new app that can help anyone become a great storyteller at work,” Pappu added.
Google aims to launch Vids in a public beta in June, which will be included as part of a user’s existing subscription.
What Else Has Happened At Google Cloud Next?
Google Meet has upgraded its service with AI note-taking and translation capabilities — although it requires an extra subscription cost.
Revealed at this week’s Google Cloud Next, “Take Notes For Me” is now in public preview. It allows users to engage with the conversation rather than manually taking notes or minutes.
Meanwhile, “Translate For Me” will be available in June and will automatically detect and translate captions in Meet. This includes support for 69 languages (equal to 4,600 language pairs), assisting users in feeling more confident and connected to their colleagues, regardless of language.
Later in 2024, Google will launch automatic translation of messages and on-demand conversation summaries in Google Chat.
These features will be available in a new AI Meetings and Messaging add-on, which costs $10 per user per month and can be added to select Workspace plans.
Google’s AI Security solution was also unveiled at this week’s Google Cloud Next.
This solution empowers IT teams to automatically categorise and safeguard sensitive files across the entire company’s Google Drive. Leveraging privacy-preserving AI models trained on organisation-specific data allows ongoing assessment, classification, and protection of existing and newly uploaded files in Drive. This functionality extends to all employees, including frontline workers, ensuring comprehensive data security and compliance measures are consistently applied.
AI Security is available for select Workspace plans for $10 per user per month.
