With Vids, Google Thinks It Has the Next Big Productivity Tool For Work

For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. From a report: Google Vids is very much not an app for making beautiful movies... or even not-that-beautiful movies. It's meant more for the sorts of things people do at work: make a pitch, update the team, explain a complicated concept. The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google's VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps. 'The ethos that we have is, if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids,' she says. 'No video production is required.'

Based on what I've seen of Vids so far, it appears to be roughly what you'd get if you transformed Google Slides into a video app. You collect assets from Drive and elsewhere and assemble them in order -- but unlike the column of slides in the Slides sidebar, you're putting together a left-to-right timeline for a video. Then, you can add voiceover or film yourself and edit it all into a finished video. A lot of those finished videos, I suspect, will look like recorded PowerPoint presentations or Meet calls or those now-ubiquitous training videos where a person talks to you from a small circle in the bottom corner while graphics play on the screen. There will be lots of clip art-heavy product promos, I'm sure. But in theory, you can make almost anything in Vids. ou can either do all this by yourself or prompt Google's Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Gemini can build a storyboard; it can write a script; it can read your script aloud with text-to-speech; it can create images for you to use in the video. The app has a library of stock video and audio that users can add to their own Vids, too.

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