Documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks have dominated work for decades. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Documents, Sheets, Slides; Pages, Numbers, Keynote. Google now wants to complete that trio with the addition of an app named Vids, which attempts to make it easier than ever for businesses and consumers to create collaborative, shareable video.
Making beautiful movies, or even not so beautiful movies, is not what Google Vids is intended for. It is primarily intended for use in professional settings for tasks like pitching, updating the team, and clarifying complex ideas.
According to Kristina Behr, Google’s vice president of product management for the Workspace collaboration products, the primary objective is to make things as simple as possible. “Our ethos is that anyone who can create a slide can create a video in Vids,” she says. “Video production is not necessary.”
From what I’ve seen so far, Vids seems to be about what you’d get if you converted Google Slides into a video application. You gather resources from Drive and other locations and arrange them in a certain sequence, but instead of creating a slide column in the Slides sidebar, you are creating a timeline for a film that runs from left to right.
After that, you can record yourself or add narration, edit it all together, and create a final video. I’m guessing that many of those completed videos will resemble prerecorded PowerPoint presentations, Meet calls, or those training movies that are so commonplace these days—where someone speaks to you from a tiny circle in the bottom corner as images scroll across the screen. I’m sure there will be a ton of product promotions that heavily feature clip art. However, theoretically, anything may be created in a video.
You have two options: either handle everything on your own, or ask Google’s Gemini AI to create a rough cut of the film.
In addition to creating a storyboard and writing a script, Gemini can also create pictures for you to utilize in the movie and read your script aloud to you using text-to-speech. Users can also include stock audio and video from the app’s collection into their own Vids. You can share whatever you’ve created in Vids with other people. However, sharing a Vid—as Google wants you to call them—is more than just sharing a file with a play button, much as with its other productivity products. Sharing allows others to make notes, add comments, and even change the video.
“We hope that it looks a lot like our other collaboration apps, but you can export it to an MP4 if you wanted to,” Behr explains. A spreadsheet and a film are similar in her and Google’s minds.
