Google's Vids Adds AI Avatars

PLUS: Decart's Lucy 2.5 edits live video in real time, and PixVerse's AI video startup crosses a $2 billion valuation

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Gen AI Art
July 21, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

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Google just gave Vids a feature that sounds like science fiction: upload a selfie and a voice clip, and the tool builds a digital version of you that can deliver lines on camera. It’s a quiet expansion of a tool built for office updates into a real AI video platform.

The bigger question is what happens when “starring in your own video” becomes as easy as typing a sentence — for creators, that’s a new production shortcut, but for anyone tracking deepfakes, it’s a fresh reason to pay attention to watermarking.

Today in AI:

  • Google Vids lets you star in AI videos

  • Decart’s Lucy 2.5 edits live video in real time

  • PixVerse crosses $2B on AI video demand

Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads

Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

What’s new? Google rolled out AI avatars inside Vids, letting anyone upload a selfie and a voice clip to generate a digital stand-in that delivers lines on camera — no camera crew required.

What matters?

  • The update also brings Gemini Omni into Vids, so you can generate and edit clips from text prompts and reference images, then keep refining a shot by just describing what to change next.

  • Every avatar is tied to the account that created it and carries an invisible SynthID watermark, so there’s no way to spin up a stand-in of someone else.

  • Anyone with a Google AI Pro or Ultra plan (or a Workspace business account) can start building right now — no separate app or waitlist.

Why it matters?

Video used to require a face, a mic, and a schedule. Google just removed all three, and it’s putting that power directly into a tool hundreds of millions of people already have open in a work tab.

GUIDE

What’s new? Decart AI released Lucy 2.5, a real-time model that reshapes a video’s world — swapping characters, outfits, and entire environments — while the footage is still streaming at 1080p and 30 frames per second.

What matters?

  • A new self-anchoring technique lets the model treat its own generated output as the new reference frame, so an edit made in the first few seconds of a stream still holds minutes later instead of drifting.

  • The model handles physical effects like water, fire, and sand realistically as it rewrites a scene, and can erase objects from a live feed with a clean, reconstructed background.

  • Custom quantization and kernel fusion techniques deliver a claimed 4x speedup, and anyone can try the live demo directly in a browser.

Why it matters?

Live AI video editing turns streaming, virtual try-ons, and interactive ads into a real-time medium instead of a post-production one. That shift could matter as much for commerce and gaming as text-to-video did for filmmaking.

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What’s new? Singapore-based video generator PixVerse closed a $439 million Series C extension, pushing its valuation past $2 billion just months after its original Series C round.

What matters?

  • The round drew backers including Alibaba, Mirae Asset, and BlueFocus, alongside returning investors iGlobe Partners and OCBC’s Lion X Ventures.

  • PixVerse says it now counts 150 million registered users and 15 million monthly active users generating 4K video with embedded audio.

  • The 150-person startup charges $4.80 per minute of image-to-video generation, a pricing model investors are betting scales as demand grows.

Why it matters?

A $2 billion valuation for a three-year-old video generator says investors think AI video demand is still climbing, not leveling off. For a crowded field competing with Runway, Kling, and Google’s own tools, that kind of capital buys room to keep iterating.

Everything else in AI

Google published a prompting guide for Nano Banana, breaking down the exact phrasing that gets clean edits and fewer wasted generations.

God of Prompt packages prompt libraries, templates, and tutorials into one bundle for turning ChatGPT and Midjourney skills into a side income.

Roblox launched Build, a mobile feature that turns a text prompt into a playable game complete with characters, environments, and sound.

Meta rolled out Muse Image, its first in-house image generator, which already ranks second on Arena’s text-to-image leaderboard behind OpenAI.

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