Google Vids now lets you star in your own AI videos

11:32 AM · July 17, 2026

Google is bringing personal AI avatars to Vids, its video creation and editing tool, according to TechCrunch, letting users generate a custom digital avatar that looks and sounds like them based on a selfie and a voice recording they upload. The update also brings Google's multimodal model Gemini Omni into Vids, letting people create videos from a written prompt combined with reference images, which Omni blends together into the requested result, and the tool can also swap a video's background, fix its lighting, or apply effects to footage recorded on a phone. Omni now supports step by step conversational edits as well, so users can adjust a video incrementally as they go rather than starting over from scratch each time they want a change. Google says the new avatars are tied to the account holder's own likeness and Google account, are invisibly watermarked with SynthID so they can be identified as AI generated after the fact, and are currently limited to users aged 18 and older in certain regions. By folding personal avatars and conversational editing directly into Google Workspace, Google is positioning Vids as a more direct competitor to dedicated AI avatar startups such as HeyGen, Synthesia, Captions, and D-ID, betting that bundling the capability into a tool many businesses already use will be more compelling than paying for a separate specialized product.