Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, speaks at the Google I/O developer conference.
Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images
Google on Tuesday announced Veo 3, an AI video generator that can also create and incorporate audio.
The artificial intelligence tool competes with OpenAI’s Sora video generator, but its ability to also incorporate audio into the video that it creates is a key distinction. The company said Veo 3 can incorporate audio that includes dialogue between characters as well as animal sounds.
“Veo 3 excels from text and image prompting to real-world physics and accurate lip syncing,” Eli Collins, Google DeepMind product vice president, said in a blog Tuesday.
The video-audio AI tool is available Tuesday to U.S. subscribers of Google’s new $249.99 per month Ultra subscription plan, which is geared toward hardcore AI enthusiasts. Veo 3 will also be available for users of Google’s Vertex AI enterprise platform.
Google also announced Imagen 4, its latest image-generation tool, which the company said produces higher-quality images through user prompts. Additionally, Google unveiled Flow, a new filmmaking tool that allows users to create cinematic videos by describing locations, shots and style preferences. Users can access the tool through Gemini, Whisk, Vertex AI and Workspace.
The latest launches come as imagery and video become popular use cases for generative AI prompts. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in March said ChatGPT’s 4o image generator was so popular that it caused the company’s computing chips to “melt.” The company said it had to temporarily limit the feature’s usage.
Google has a mixed track record when it comes to its AI image generators. Last year, the company had to relaunch its Imagen 3 tool after it surfaced historically inaccurate results to users’ prompts, causing widespread criticism. Co-founder Sergey Brin later said the mishap was due to a lack of “thorough testing.”
The Mountain View, California, company also updated its Veo 2 video generator to include the ability for users to add or remove objects from videos with text prompts. Additionally, Google opened its Lyria 2 music-generation model to creators through its YouTube Shorts platform and businesses using Vertex AI.
