Google expands Workspace offering with Vids: an AI-powered video editing tool. Vids is your video, writing, production and editing assistant all in one.

Companies use video in everything from training and onboarding videos for employees to marketing videos for customers. Videos are an effective medium to convey the story of your company: a (moving) picture is worth a thousand words. But not everyone has the knowledge and creativity to create a video. Google is trying to lower the creative barrier with a new AI video creation tool in Workspace: Vids.

1,2,3, Action!

Google describes Vids as a “video, writing, production and editing assistant all in one.” First, you tell Vids what type of video you want to create, such as a sales video for a new product. You can share a slide presentation with the tool to give videos a good foundation. Vids will suggest a storyboard and visual style one at a time, then write a script for you.

Vids also lets you add stock footage, background music, and voice-overs to your video. For the latter, you can choose from a range of pre-programmed voices or record the voice-over yourself.

Work together on a video

Videos will be part of the Workspace portfolio and will work alongside documents, slides and tables. As with the other Workspace apps, you can collaborate online and in real time with colleagues who have access to the video. Google will roll out videos to a test audience through Workspace Labs starting in June. Google has not yet announced when the video tool will be generally available.

With Vids, Google is venturing into the field of AI video creation for the first time. However, the tool should not be confused with OpenAI’s Sora, which was announced in February. Sora generates video images based on a text prompt. Vids helps you sort and frame the images, but cannot create images.