Google announced on July 16, 2026 that Google Vids, its video creation tool, now lets users make a digital version of themselves from a selfie and a short voice recording. The digital version, called an avatar, can appear in videos you create. The avatar is tied to your Google account, so other people cannot copy it or use it without your permission. The update also adds features like editing video by typing instructions, turning a still image into a video, swapping backgrounds, fixing lighting, and adding visual effects. You can also make changes step by step instead of starting over every time you want to adjust something (TechCrunch).

These features are powered by a Google AI model called Gemini Omni Flash, which the company described in a separate blog post the same day (Google Workspace Blog). Gemini Omni Flash can create video from a written description plus images a user uploads, and it lets users edit existing footage by typing text commands.

The personal avatar feature is limited to people 18 or older in certain regions. Google adds an invisible watermark to each avatar using a system called SynthID, which helps identify content as AI-made. The avatar is also tied to the account holder's face and Google account to stop others from misusing it (TechCrunch).

The avatars and the Gemini Omni model are available to people who pay for Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriptions, and to Google Workspace business customers (Google Blog). Google Vids also has a free option that lets users create, edit, and share videos without paying. Google introduced this free tier in August 2025 and mentioned it again in April 2026 updates (Google Blog; Google Blog).

Google Vids is part of Google Workspace, the collection of tools that includes Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Google positions Vids as a business tool for making company updates and training videos. Besides avatars and AI video creation, Vids can trim transcripts automatically, improve voiceovers using AI, and distribute branded videos to large audiences through a feature called Workspace Drops (Google Workspace Blog; Google Workspace Blog; Google Workspace Blog).

This update puts Google Vids in competition with other AI video companies, including HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions, and D-ID (TechCrunch). Those companies focus specifically on making videos with digital avatars. Google's version does not necessarily do more than those tools can do. Its advantage is that Vids is already built into Workspace, which many businesses use every day for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

The invisible watermark and the rule that avatars must match the account holder suggest Google is taking care to prevent misuse. By limiting avatars to your own face and your own account rather than letting anyone create any avatar, Google reduces the chance of the tool being used to make fake videos of other people. Whether the watermark stays intact after a video is re-uploaded or re-encoded on other platforms is a technical question that Google's announcement does not address.

For the companies that specialize in AI video, Google's entry changes the picture. HeyGen and Synthesia have competed by offering deeper and more specialized features. Google's advantage is simpler: if a business already pays for Workspace, Vids costs nothing extra, needs no separate purchase, and requires no new vendor review. The step-by-step editing also solves a real frustration, since AI video tools have typically required regenerating an entire clip when you want to change just one thing.

The free tier makes it even easier to try. A manager who wants to make a training video can do so without getting budget approval, using their own face as the avatar, in the same tool where their team already works. That convenience matters more than any individual feature in the update.

Google has not shared specific details about how fast the video generation is, what resolution the output supports, or how long clips can be. The company also has not said which regions are excluded from the avatar feature beyond the 18-and-over requirement. These details will affect how useful Vids is for real work, and they are missing from the announcement.

The bigger story is that Google is adding AI video tools to the same suite where people already work, just as it previously added AI text tools to Docs and AI image tools to Slides. On their own, these features match what specialist companies already offer. Bundled into Workspace with a free tier, they change what businesses are likely to choose.