Google can now create videos with your face and voice — and it might make cameras obsolete

Google Vids, the company’s online video tool, has received two major updates. The service now includes personal avatars that can replicate your appearance and voice, along with the multimodal Gemini Omni model, which was first unveiled back in May 2026. Now, creating a clip featuring yourself or editing existing footage takes little more than a couple of lines of text.

Until now, Vids only offered a library of pre-made digital characters, and if you wanted a video with a specific person’s face, you had to go the old-fashioned route and actually shoot it. The update changes all that: the service can now generate a video avatar that mimics your facial features and the timbre of your voice. The mechanics are straightforward: you upload a selfie and a short voice recording, type out your message, and the avatar will voice it and visually "deliver" it to the camera. As Google explains, this is for those times when you need to send a quick personal video or voice message but don’t have the time to turn on the camera and reshoot take after take.

At the same time as the avatars, Vids also rolled out the Gemini Omni model. This is a multimodal generative AI that can create video based on both text descriptions and visual cues — like a photo, a storyboard, or even a rough hand-drawn sketch. Editing, too, no longer requires starting a project from scratch; you can simply describe the changes you want in plain language: remove the background, fix the lighting, add an effect — and the system will apply those edits to the existing clip. The step-by-step approach, the developers say, is meant to save users from having to start over after every failed draft.

Google Vids has technically been around for about a year, and in that time, the company says users have created millions of videos on the platform. In February 2026, the platform added support for Veo 3.1, and now, with Omni and the avatars, its AI generation capabilities have expanded even further. Both new features are already available, but with a few caveats. Personal avatars are restricted to adult subscribers (18+) in a limited set of regions. On top of that, the avatar is strictly tied to your Google account — it will only replicate the account owner’s appearance, so you can’t upload someone else’s face. As for pricing, both the personal avatars and Gemini Omni are included in the Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions, and are also available to Google Workspace business customers.

Google was careful to stress that all generated content goes through a digital marking process. Every AI-produced clip gets an invisible SynthID watermark, which makes it possible to technically verify that a video was created with the help of artificial intelligence. In effect, users can now produce video content without ever touching a camera.

What do you think of this approach — would you trust an AI avatar with your face and voice for work or personal messages, or do you prefer the good old-fashioned camera recording? Drop your thoughts in the comments.