Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Google just made its powerful AI video generator free for everyone

Making a polished AI video no longer requires a paid Workspace subscription, and Google is giving you much more control over the final result, too.

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
File, Text, Webpage
Google

Google is making it much easier to experiment with AI-generated video. The company is expanding Google Vids beyond its previous availability, allowing anyone with a Google or Google Workspace account to use the video creation tool for free.

More importantly, this isn’t a stripped-down version of Vids. Google is bringing its Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash model along for the ride, which means you can generate video clips from scratch and have considerably more say over how they turn out. The idea is to make Vids useful even if you’ve never touched professional video editing software.

Google is giving you more control over AI video

One of the more interesting parts of the update is how much control Google is putting in your hands. Instead of entering a prompt and hoping the resulting clip fits your project, you can be much more precise about what you need. For example, Vids can now extend an existing scene while trying to preserve important details such as the characters, environment, and lighting. You can also specify exactly how long you want an AI-generated clip to be, which should make fitting footage around a script or voiceover considerably easier.

Person, Adult, Female
Google

Quality is also getting an upgrade. Newly generated scenes can be created in 1080p, while existing AI clips can be upscaled to HD. That’s particularly useful when you’re stitching several generated scenes together and don’t want one noticeably softer clip breaking the illusion. Google is also positioning Vids as something you can jump into quickly. Templates can help turn product photos or other existing material into a finished video without requiring you to manually build everything from an empty timeline.

AI voiceovers are coming next

Google isn’t stopping with visuals. The company says Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite-powered text-to-speech is coming soon to Vids, allowing you to turn a written script into a voiceover in more than 100 languages. That could make Vids a much more complete creation tool. You could theoretically go from an idea to generated footage and narration without recording your own audio or opening a traditional video editor. It also includes an AI disclosure measure. Videos generated using Omni 1.1 include Google’s SynthID watermark inside their frames, providing a way to identify the footage as AI-generated.

Gemini on Pixel 11 Pro XL.
Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends

Anyone with a Google or Google Workspace account can start using Vids and Omni 1.1 without paying. Google says its paid AI plans will provide higher generation limits for personal accounts, while Workspace Business and Enterprise customers get additional capacity and administrative controls. For casual creators, though, the biggest change is much simpler: one of Google’s most capable AI video tools just became considerably easier to try.

Shimul Sood
Shimul Sood
Contributor
Shimul is a contributor at Digital Trends, with over five years of experience in the tech space.
Topics
A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing
Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.
a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Read more
AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users
A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.
Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Read more
Etsy cracks down on AI slop listings. Everyone else needs to take note.
Now every platform must decide what counts as handmade.
Etsy featured image

Platforms tend to shrug off AI clutter until it threatens what they sell. For Etsy, that thing is trust in the maker.

To protect that, Etsy has banned AI-generated how-to guides and listings made entirely by bots. Most sellers must show at least one unretouched photo of the item (via Etsy Seller Handbook).

Read more