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Enhanced AI avatar features and capabilities in Google Vids

With the integration of Gemini 3.1 Flash Text-To-Speech (TTS) and the latest capabilities in Veo 3.1, AI avatars in Google Vids have become more realistic and expressive than ever. We’re excited to announce expanded language support, a new collection of avatar defaults, and the ability to direct your custom avatars to take action in any generated video.

Expanded preset avatars with more expressive speaking


Several examples of realistic avatars

Several examples of 3D cartoon avatars

Samples of new default avatars

We’ve expanded avatar options from 23 to 53 default presets, spanning photorealistic, 3D cartoon, and graphic novel styles. This broader gallery includes avatars like Sofia, Jack, Charlie, Finley, and Eleanor, all powered by Gemini Audio to speak with greater degrees of expression, realism, and conversational tones.

Expanded speaker support to 24 languages


List of supported languages

Full list of language support in Google Vids UI

We’ve added support for 16 new languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Arabic, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Romanian, and Ukrainian. These languages join our existing set—English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, French, Italian, and German—bringing the total to 24 supported languages for AI avatar and voiceovers.

Create custom avatars with the latest Gemini voice model


UI for creating a custom avatar, including box to add a name
User experience of assigning new voices to custom avatars

With custom avatars in Vids, you can design your avatar using Nano Banana Pro. Starting today, you can choose from 30+ voices powered by Gemini Audio that offer increased expression, language support, and steering control over how they speak.

Direct your custom avatars to take action in addition to speaking



Generated sample of a directed custom avatar

Previously, users could only direct default avatars. Now, you can add custom avatars as an ingredient in generated video clips, unlocking new ways to have your customized spokesperson tell your story. Every generation preserves your custom avatar's appearance and voice, ensuring your customizations are preserved throughout new generations.

  • Control custom actions: Instruct your avatar to walk, talk, and use objects simply by typing a text prompt describing their actions.
  • Use image references: Upload additional images to direct your avatar in customized locations or with branded logos.

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Education: Education Plus
  • Consumer: All users with personal Google accounts, including Google AI Pro and Ultra
  • Other Editions: Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus; Nonprofits; Individual
  • Education Add-ons: Teaching and Learning; Google AI Pro for Education
  • Other Add-ons: AI Expanded Access*
*Users with AI Expanded Access add-on licenses have higher limits on usage of AI avatars in Vids.

Resources

Create longer Veo videos and generate multiple at once in Google Vids

Starting today, we’re introducing powerful new ways to create and iterate on video content in Google Vids using Veo. These updates provide all Vids users with the ability to create longer videos with consistent characters and generate multiple videos in parallel, enabling you to bring your vision to life faster than ever before.

  • Longer Veo videos: You can now extend existing video clips using Veo to create longer, more immersive content while ensuring perfect storytelling continuity across your scenes.
  • Generate multiple clips at once: Increase your productivity by kicking off multiple video generation requests at once, allowing you to explore different styles and prompts simultaneously to save time.


Extend video clips using Veo

Getting started

Rollout pace

Availability

  • Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
  • Education: Education Plus
  • Consumer: All users with personal Google accounts, including Google AI Pro and Ultra
  • Other Editions: Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus; Nonprofits; Individual
  • Education Add-ons: Teaching and Learning; Google AI Pro for Education
  • Other Add-ons: AI Expanded Access*
*Users with AI Expanded Access add-on licenses have higher limits on video generation using Veo in Vids.

Resources

Enhance Security and Trust: New Session Metadata in Sign in with Google

Google is enhancing Sign in with Google by introducing new OIDC standard claims—specifically auth_time and amr (Authentication Methods Reference) to provide developers with deeper session metadata. These updates allow verified apps to verify the "freshness" of a user's login and the specific authentication methods used (such as MFA or hardware keys), enabling more dynamic, risk-based access controls. By leveraging these federated identity signals, platforms can better prevent account takeover and fraud while implementing granular security policies like step-up authentication for sensitive actions.

Chrome for Android Update

Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 149 (149.0.7827.159) for Android. It'll become available on Google Play over the next few days. 

This release includes stability and performance improvements. You can see a full list of the changes in the Git log. If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.


Android releases contain the same security fixes as their corresponding Desktop releases (Windows & Mac: 149.0.7827.155/156, Linux: 149.0.7872.155) unless otherwise noted.

Harry Souders

Open rails for agentic commerce at Open Source Summit North America 2026

by Anurag Sinha, Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)

At Open Source Summit North America 2026, I shared why agentic commerce needs open rails.

As AI agents become more capable, the shopping journey is shifting from "show me" to "help me." Instead of browsing, comparing, clicking, and checking out step by step, people can increasingly ask an agent to help them decide what to buy and, in some cases, complete the purchase. Industry forecasts suggest agentic shopping could account for roughly 10% to 25% of U.S. e-commerce by 2030 (Bain), which points to a meaningful shift in how digital commerce will work. Watch the full keynote here.

Why shared rules matter

That shift also exposes a challenge. Commerce is still highly fragmented. Different businesses, payment providers, and platforms operate with their own rules, workflows, and business logic. Every new surface adds more integration work. Every bespoke connection creates more complexity. And that fragmentation makes it harder for AI systems to understand and perform commerce actions consistently across businesses. A shared language lowers that barrier for everyone.

A common language for agentic commerce

That is the problem Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is designed to solve.

We launched the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, with industry leaders to establish an open standard for agentic commerce, built to work across the shopping journey. UCP creates a common language for agents and systems to operate together across consumer surfaces, businesses, and payment providers, so the ecosystem does not need a different bespoke integration for every new agent or platform.

Just as importantly, UCP is designed for the real world. Every business has its own way of selling. Checkout, fulfillment, loyalty, policy logic, shipping, and post-purchase flows can vary widely between a local shop, a marketplace, and a large retailer. UCP is built to support that reality.

A diagram of the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), subtitled 'The common language for platforms, agents and businesses.' It illustrates a central UCP framework containing modules for 'Shopping' and 'Common' services, flanked by 'Consumer platforms' on the left and 'Business platforms' on the right, with bidirectional arrows showing how they connect and communicate through the central protocol.

A layered architecture for a shared commerce language

UCP uses a layered model to create a reusable shared language for commerce. Services organize domains like shopping and common. Capabilities define core actions such as checkout, catalog, cart, orders, and shared functions like identity linking. Extensions keep those capabilities configurable, so features like fulfillment can be modeled once and reused across multiple flows instead of being hardwired each time. At the transport layer, UCP stays agnostic, supporting bindings like REST, Model Context Protocol, and Agent2Agent.

Together with capability discovery and payment handling, these layers help consumer platforms, agents, and businesses interoperate more consistently over time. They also let different participants advertise what they support, compose new behaviors, and communicate over the transport that works best for them.

Built in the open

A standard for everyone should be shaped by everyone. Because UCP is open, merchants, developers, and community contributors can pressure-test real-world gaps, propose new capabilities and extensions, and help make sure the protocol reflects more than the needs of the largest players. That kind of participation is what keeps an ecosystem moving.

Since launch, UCP has continued to evolve through new capabilities, an expanded Tech Council, and new consumer experiences built on top of the protocol. That momentum matters because standards only work when the ecosystem uses them.

Watch the full keynote

Agentic commerce is still evolving, and UCP is a foundational building block to support what's next in this new era.

If you want the full architecture walkthrough and the complete story from Open Source Summit North America, watch the session here. And if you want to go deeper, you can explore the UCP documentation, join the community conversation, and contribute to the public repository.