Meet Vids, Google’s new AI-powered editor for the videos you hate to make

If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s own Clipchamp video editor, Google would like you to know that you now have another alternative: Google Vids, which will leverage Google’s powers of AI with your own documents to create short videos.

Google thinks highly enough of Vids that it will elevate it into the pantheon of other Google Workspace apps, including Docs, Slides, and Sheets, the company said.

For whatever reason, Google isn’t directly challenging Clipchamp, Microsoft’s rather delightful video editor, or Canva, another video and graphic content-creation tool that has emerged as a popular alternative and with AI-generated content. Instead, it’s essentially treating video as one of those business tasks that has to be done, but doesn’t require a lot of creativity — like a training video or customer testimonial.

Vids, then, looks pretty familiar. Ask Vids to create a particular type of video and it surfaces a bunch of templates. The secret appears to be its ability for you to direct (or for it to intelligently choose) bits and pieces of information or documents that you have already created or stored to help create the video. (This isn’t exactly clear, since Google hasn’t said much about beyond the introductory video, included at the bottom of this story.)

The UI, though, looks fairly standard, with the ability to drag and drop video clips and other content, on top of an audio track.

It also appears that AI will be used to select from a collection of stock video, images, and music, as well as arrange all of the bits into a coherent whole. AI will also be an option to create voiceovers, or you can use your own.

Google Vids isn’t here yet; the video below says that it’s “coming soon” to Workplace. Maybe we’ll see more of it at the Google I/O conference in May.

Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor