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With Vids, Google thinks it has the next big productivity tool for work
- t_mann 3y ago> You can ... prompt Google’s Gemini AI to make a first draft of the video for you. Can I also ask Gemini to give me a text summary of a Vid?
- dudus 3y agoyes eg: https://g.co/gemini/share/2d77c73c2ad3 https://g.co/gemini/share/2d77c73c2ad3
- gareth_untether 3y ago[flagged]
- beretguy 3y ago[flagged]
- belval 3y agoMy prediction on this: people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline", people will get crunched and not watch the videos before finally re-scheduling meetings where the authors will step-by-step in the videos and present the content as we used to do with slides.
- mbrumlow 3y agoBefore any of that happens it will be renamed and branded so somebody can get promoted, closely followed with canceled to make way for the next big thing.
- Justsignedup 3y agoCynical but on point. My thought is I unfortunately don't trust Google for product launches because of exactly this. And I know anyone at startups might be thinking similar things.
- LordAtlas 3y agoAnd with Google's track record, eventually end up on KilledByGoogle.com
- vineyardmike 3y agoCynicism is generally warranted, but they have a pretty good track record with Workplace/GSuite products geared towards paying enterprises.
- soraminazuki 3y agoGoogle Domains and Jamboard come to mind.
- rkagerer 3y agoThey killed Postini to get there and lost me as a paying customer.
- Swizec 3y ago> people will create videos, people will stop attending meeting because "I'll just watch the video offline" This is why I have a strong “no recordings” rule for any meeting that benefits from back-and-forth conversation. Especially if it’s a knowledge sharing opportunity like an internal tech talk, brown bag discussion, or similar. Nothing sucks more than presenting a talk to 3 blank squares, getting no questions, and having 30 people ask for a recording. No.
- falcor84 3y agoYou can treat it as recording a YouTube video
- Swizec 3y agoI prefer to treat it like a small club standup session. These meetings are how you figure out what to put in the youtube video or other documentation. Audience questions are vital.
- nlawalker 3y agoDo you call them “brown bags” and “tech talks”? For a lot of people those terms imply a one-way presentation.
- Swizec 3y agoNot all feedback is explicit. Being able to see when you're confusing the audience helps a lot. Beyond that it depends on situation. Talk at a large conference is obviously one-way. Private talk to a "room" of 10 people who work with you on similar problems can be very interactive. The best ones are a low-fi 15min talk followed by a 45min discussion. Those 45min discussions are pure gold for a future large conference talk.
- jitl 3y agoThis is not the point of meetings though. Meetings are for Aligning Stakeholders or Collaborating Across Teams at least in my world. Do you regularly attend meetings to be an audience member?
- happysadpanda2 3y agoAt various places of employment, /some/ meetings have absolutely been just so. Nothing of day-to-day value was ever communicated in those meetings, and nothing of value was lost when I stopped attending them. Sprint Demos could also fall into this category if you squint, but at least there is a good chance you pick up something useful
- nlawalker 3y agoIt’s not always that there’s no value in what’s communicated; often it’s just that there’s not much value in attending live. Teams’ auto-transcription, and now Copilot auto-summarization, is great for consuming these presentations after the fact in a fraction of the time.
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- haliskerbas 3y agoMost companies I've worked at have had some form of that, yes.
- vundercind 3y agoSee also: newsletters of all sorts. I’m pretty sure everyone’s just using LLMs to write those now, and nothing of value was lost versus ten plus hours of actual human labor, since nobody reads them. [edit] I mean internal corporate newsletters. “What department X is doing!” OMG nobody cares unless they’re just reading it out of sheer boredom as a plausibly-work-related distraction during avoidance of doing actual work.
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- hightrix 3y agoThis sounds awful. Video is the worst way to consume anything technical, for me. Video tutorials and video code walk throughs are completely worthless for most things. I hope this is just another Google product that they shut down in a year and that it doesn't catch on.
- belval 3y agoThere will be a fast follow for video transcription and search in videos so that people end up creating videos that nobody watch but get indexed by some internal system and provide a concise 1-pager for human consumption that should have been the original work output anyway. /s
- esafak 3y agoYou're saying they're more promotions to be had??
- echelon 3y agoLoom is one of the best tools for remote work. If this is free and in Google Docs, I won't need Loom anymore. Loom should be terrified. This will probably also be added to YouTube, so CapCut and the like are about to be checkmated too. The biggest worry for this product is that it's from Google and we know how they are about products.
- bl4kers 3y agoThis doesn't appear to be marketed or have features like Loom. Loom is primarily a point-and-click screen record capture tool. This is a lightweight video editor with some AI sprinkled on top to make content generation easier.
- baby 3y agoI thought the same thing. If I were loom this is a very scary news. Expect loom response to look like “we are not competing on the same product” and then loom to be acquired by salesforce
- MaximumMadness 3y agoFWIW - Loom was acquired by Atlassian earlier this year
- rkagerer 3y agoit's from Google and we know how they are about products Does the company just not care about it's reputation in regards to this?
- killingtime74 3y agoNot enough to change apparently
- OrvalWintermute 3y agoThere is an associated problem we've seen in screencasting For every minute of screentime, there is time requirement for writing, practicing, filming, editing, fixing bad takes, etc. While I can whip up a presentation quickly, videos take quite a bit more. The pros make it look easy, but it isn't
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoI feel the opposite though for lots of internal communication. I often see so much time that (to me) feels wasted when employees do tons of "polish" for slide decks for internal teams. Like you're just communicating to other employees, the goal is just to get the information across, not make it a work of art. With a video I can quickly just say what needs to be communicated, but then with some highlighted bullets (which I'm assuming Vids will make it easy to timestamp) to make it easier to reference. Again, I think it really depends on the audience and purpose, but if used efficiently I think lots of time wasted on slide deck prep could be regained.
- azinman2 3y agoAll communications should be ideally polished. That’s you taking the time to refine your ideas and package it so those who listen to you can focus on the message and story you want to tell them, and not be distracted by irrelevant details, guesses, or just sloppy work.
- baby 3y agoI hear you but I polish my loom videos so they can be as short and concise as possible. And by polish I mean I rerecord myself like 5 times
- baby 3y agoThat’s why I got excited here. If I could just record short videos and then easily create something that stitch all of that then it would simplify the flow greatly.
- graypegg 3y agoIt's odd to me that they wanted to make a whole new "app" for this, rather than building in some sort of timeline into slides. Powerpoint supports automatically transitioning slides and auto playing video, so with some fancy magic in the export where they slice the video for each slide, you could even do everything in a "compatible" way. Slides would of course be able to keep the video on top of the slides + transitions, playing at all times. Though to be fair, this could just be slides' codebase, with some extra UI changes on top of it. Just feels like an odd way to brand it though, especially with the market penetration + built up institutional knowledge of slides' UI.
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- Seb-C 3y agoSomeone probably wanted a promotion, or to use the latest shiny framework rather than an existing codebase.
- vkou 3y agoYou'd absolutely get a promotion for building a significant new feature into an existing application. It can also a lot harder to do than greenfield development.
- surge 3y agoNot at Google, they skew towards new projects for performance reviews. Not improving or maintaining existing projects. Which is why they have 3 different versions of hangouts/Meet, play music being replaced by YT Music which does the same thing and is slowly building back in the same functionality, and a lot of abandonware and stagnated core products like search/gmail/slides, etc. There was a great blog on here where an (ex maybe) Google engineer first pointed out this problem and a good reason why he left since he realized this too late and all his time making huge performance improvements in existing products meant nothing come review time and all his colleagues got promoted. Since then it's been documented several times: https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-cultures https://www.warp.dev/blog/problems-with-promotion-oriented-c... https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064 https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1576985038511448064 "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcome" Maintaining and improving existing projects is a footgun at Google because of the way their promotion structure works. Unless they've changed something fundamental about their review process, of which I've not heard, it's still the same. This launch of a new product rather than naturally being integrated into an existing one that already fills this space and has adoption seems to prove its still the case.
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- blackeyeblitzar 3y agoMy guess is that this is a product aiming to mimic the success and popularity of Loom more than anyone else, although it may also just be a response to Microsoft acquiring Clipchamp for in-browser video editing in 2021 (https://clipchamp.com/en/blog/microsoft-acquires-clipchamp-to-empower-creators/ https://clipchamp.com/en/blog/microsoft-acquires-clipchamp-t...). Loop was likewise acquired by Atlassian late last year (https://www.loom.com/blog/loom-atlassian https://www.loom.com/blog/loom-atlassian ). As far as Loom goes, video-based messaging and communication has the power to be a great low effort and high bandwidth for both the creator and recipient. It’s certainly easier to talk over a screen recording and send that over to someone, compared to typing out a long series of steps describing what you are doing and then also writing up the “why”. On the other hand, I do wonder if these types of apps are short-lived. What happens when the recipient is just using AI to get a summary of your video (instead of viewing it and benefiting from your nice graphics), or where they can use an AI to mimic what your screen recording shows (instead of needing to act on it themselves)? What about when an AI agent can just be a shadow trailing the creator’s actions and automatically put together a video to share with others? Product features aside, I do have concerns when I see the big tech companies launch products like this. Don’t get me wrong - I think this is going to be an interesting and useful product for Google Workspace users. But I can’t help but feel that there’s something unfair or wrong about large companies creating new copycat products and entering segments that are established by smaller pre public companies first. Those smaller companies have had to struggle and survive - that means hiring early employees, finding your first customers, iterating rapidly, convincing investors, getting to product-market fit, all to most likely fail some day. Surviving is a difficult journey that requires talent, hard work, resilience, and some luck. But comparatively, it’s trivial for a trillion-Dollar tech company to just mimic features or entire products from others. It doesn’t really even matter if their efforts even succeed or not - a large company can afford to lose money on these things and shut down failed attempts in a few years without any risk to the company. Worse, they can act anti-competitively and bundle these new features/products alongside other things, like Microsoft did with Teams or Google is planning to do here, and deprive those deserving smaller companies of their markets. I feel like we need better language than “monopoly” to describe this dynamic. But what’s the fix? Updated competition laws? Higher taxes on companies above a certain size? Something else?
- jdlyga 3y agoHacker News, April 2028: Google discontinues support for Vids, an experimental collaboration tool
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- joezydeco 3y agoWhen they add a chat feature, then the clock starts ticking.
- glenstein 3y agoI actually wonder if they can't just openly commit to something like a five-year plan for support, along the lines of commitments to security updates to android. Just a resolve that they will not terminate their product in its first five years. I think a good way to address the crisis of credibility Google has with their commitment to their own products is to just make articulated timelines of support something considered as fundamental as the code base itself. It could admittedly be perceived of as a negative, because a "cliff" could approach. But the flip side is that we are where we are in the absence of credible commitments, and I think the present status quo is worse.
- padjo 3y agoI’ll happily take the under on that
- riffic 3y ago2028 is awfully optimistic. I give this less than a year of a lifespan.
- Oarch 3y ago[flagged]
- sfink 3y agoYes, I'm grateful to the author too.
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- Seb-C 3y agoNot bad, so instead of having people spend time making powerpoints and then give presentations while everyone else pretends to listen, now the presenter can auto generate it while everyone else pretends to have clicked the link. This is a more efficient way to waste time, it might actually succeed in many companies (until Google kills it anyway).
- joezydeco 3y agoSee, then there's a future market in having your personal AI watch the video for you and send you a two-sentence summary. It's like the opposite of compression. Expand a piece of data 10-fold for transmission, then recompress it back down at the other side.
- jimbokun 3y agoThen we can compare the two sentence summary used to prompt the first AI to generate the video, to the two sentence summary produced by the second AI watching the video, to see if there was any loss of information.
- peppertree 3y agoMy AI generated avatar will nod along your AI generated video. Win-win.
- cjk2 3y agoI'm wondering if this Dilbert was prophetic https://imgur.com/a/JB5g9Fx https://imgur.com/a/JB5g9Fx
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- signal11 3y agoProbably in response to Microsoft Stream and Zoom Recordings. Incidentally for the hackers out there: it’s surprisingly easy to build an in-house video sharing platform if you have engineers who like hackathons. I was surprised how little it costs to run in the larger scheme of things, no cloud fees required.
- barbazoo 3y ago> For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks. Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides. Now Google is proposing to add another to that triumvirate: an app called Vids that aims to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video more easily than ever. When you have a hammer, in this case GenAI, every problem looks like a nail
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- hidelooktropic 3y agoI've always been skeptical of generative AI being used to make slides. I like the idea of it, and maybe someday we will get there. But right now, they all feel like they are trying to fully automate the process where what I really want them to do is automate the tedious parts, co-piloting with me. Because what ends up happening is I need a high degree of precision and I have a very concrete idea of what I need to present on a slide and exactly how to do it. But because it's fully automated, I have to instead convince the AI to generate my concrete idea on its own. Then I just don't use it entirely. Meanwhile, I go back to tediously making little shapes and moving them into precise locations, aligning things, and so on.
- badwolf 3y agoI feel you. I wish PowerPoint's "Design suggestions" could at least be editable. It will often suggest a similar layout that looks nicer, but with some dumb crayon looking lines. Just let me (re)move that stupid line at the very least.
- guestbest 3y agoThey are automating the parts you want to work on to replace you. The AI is there to be trained until the your part can be eliminated.
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- pquki4 3y agoI tried Copilot on PowerPoint once and I swear I'll never use it again. (Or at least not until it is 10x better.) I asked it to generate slides on a technical topic. I wasn't expecting it to fill in a lot of details, but what I got was 10 slides of stock photos next to some very high-level ideas that almost mean nothing. Think of those presentations that take half an hour but really only has 5 minutes of content. I ended up throwing away the entire thing and start over, creating slides myself.
- baby 3y agoI am sooo interested in this because I think loom is one of the best and most useful products for communicating knowledge. Especially in remote companies. But it’s not interactive! I want to be able for people to add and insert videos, and for me to insert responses or keep building a video based on what people asked. I’m surprised by the skepticism here. Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, and text is just not enough IMO. The future is: everybody has tablet they can draw with (like the ipad pro) and can easily communicate back and forth by cobuilding an interactive timeline of videos. I see the vision.
- arrosenberg 3y agoI'm personally skeptical because the only thing I want to do less than watch a presentation is be forced to watch a video.
- lxgr 3y agoHow about attending a "webinar"?
- unconsciousrais 3y agoThe skepticism is also driven by Google's track record of killing products and generally lacking a long-term or stable roadmap of product lines (with very few giant exceptions).
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- JohnFen 3y agoHonestly, that future sounds like a total nightmare to me. I think this comes down to that different people are better with different kinds of media. I don't do well with video at all. I do best with the written word.
- skeeter2020 3y ago>> Slides suck ass to communicate ideas, Slides are not, and should not, be the primary medium for communicating information. They're a skeleton to hang together a presentation, set tone and context, and anchor your ideas. If they are information dense you need to be very, very careful; typically it's a sign of failure when they're too dense. I love a good presentation, a well designed deck that compliments a presenter who knows their stuff and has (gasp!) practiced... I can't stand bad slide decks and have no tolerance for the lazy garbage that is the majority.
- falcor84 3y agoI'm not clear from the article on whether Vids is already available, or even if there's a timeline for its release.
- constantcrying 3y agoHorrifying. If you want to transfer information, then text + illustration is the best way to accomplish that. Now we get a 10 Minute Video of an AI narrating a 5 Bullet point list the user gave it with AI generated visuals. Productivity just has to go through the roof.
- peeters 3y agoAs an alternative to slides it might work well, but both are terrible formats for reference material (anything where you need to extract a quick piece of information). The shift to having to mine YouTube videos for much of the world's specialized knowledge is a shame, and Google makes it worse every day with how they prioritize search results.
- gia_ferrari 3y agoI run a local Tube Archivist mirror and having live, predictable full-text search of descriptions, transcripts, and user comments has been a breath of fresh air (it's backed by ElasticSearch, so you can go full-contact if needed). I appreciate YouTube's official search for its accessibility, speed, and spooky "it knew what I meant" ability, but it's a tragedy that this is the only supported way to search their library. I consider YouTube's archive a wonder of the world, and it's a shame that it is locked behind an engagement-polluted interface.
- JohnFen 3y ago> I appreciate YouTube's official search for its accessibility, speed, and spooky "it knew what I meant" ability That's interesting to hear, because my experience with YouTube search is poor. It will find text that appears in the title of a video, but that's about it. It certainly has no idea of "what I meant".
- tqi 3y agoI absolutely LOATH it when people post a video instead of a document or deck (except in cases when they need to demo something) because they essentially offload the work onto the audience. Obviously there are exceptions, but in general writing an update requires the author plan what they want to communicate. In my experience, off-the-cuff Loom videos are often rambling and verbose, and leave it to the viewer to synthesize. On top of that, videos are harder to scan, harder to search, and require headphones or a quiet space to be consumed.
- tehruhn 3y agoGood point! I think a useful addendum would be to only allow videos below a certain length - for instance, a 30 second/1 minute demonstration.
- ipaddr 3y agoIf someone is doing a walkthrough give them the three minutes
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- drcongo 3y agoI would give this post all my upvotes if I could.
- rurp 3y agoI agree with this. My company started pushing these types of short videos more and they have not been popular, at least with my peers. On the creator side it takes an awful lot of time to create a clear and concise video, especially for people who are much more used to writing docs than creating videos of themselves. Videos are a terrible medium for the audience, at least for any technical and referenceable material. They aren't searchable and are much slower to consume than text. Old videos almost never get watched, whereas some older documents get read often.
- chasd00 3y agoarticle mentions no plans to integrate to youtube but i bet it's added on the first update. "One thing missing, though? Any sign of YouTube. You know, that other video service Google owns. Behr laughs when I mention it and says that there’s some tech shared between the products but that “the audience and use cases are pretty fundamentally different” between the two products. This is a work product, for workers, to use at work. “We’re trying to make sure we’re really supporting that use case, you know?”" a lot of content for "work" ends up on youtube too.
- MaximumMadness 3y agoSo it's Loom, but with Google Doc integrations?
- Animats 3y agoNow we need something to read "Vids", extract the text, and summarize.
- cess11 3y agoSeems they just removed the presenters contact with the audience for the duration of a talk, putting a dead version of themselves in their place. How is that "productivity"? Is this a reference to Google making more money compared to live talks? I have a hard time perceiving it as anything but a solution looking for a problem.
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- sour-taste 3y agoInfrastructure side, probably quite a few already. On the product side Google does often hold promotions until the project demonstrates impact. What is likely to happen is that if the project succeeds everyone will get promoted. If it doesn't people will try and get promoted of their piece while blaming the failure on others 'oh but MY piece worked great the problem was everyone else's stuff'
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- ShamelessC 3y agoSo does the verge just do ads for Google now?
- riffic 3y ago[flagged]
- adolph 3y agoToo wide instead of portrait and doesn't demonstrate a person talking with superimposed emphasis words and emojicons. TikTok for Enterprise is going to clean their clock.
- adverbly 3y agoI love loom. I also wish it did a lot more. Excited to see more happening in this area. Video content creation tools are something Google has needed for a long time. Between YouTube, youtube shorts, generative AI, and everything loom does, there is a clear opportunity.
- fetzu 3y agoOne of my worst nightmares, using videos to convey information. It was bad enough with this wave of YouTube “guides” that take eight minutes to explain something which could have been done in a paragraph. Videos are also the worst searchable medium, really looking forward to having to scan through hours of content to find “that thing I saw six months ago”. Who in their right mind would think that video could be a productivity tool!?
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- atoav 3y ago> One of my worst nightmares, using videos to convey information. I mean videos can be great for educational content. But the putting out a video takes significantly longer than watching it. And theoretically you could make it just as searchable as anything else. The problem is that people suck at communicating clearly and concisely already, add to that a narcissist guy who likes to see himself talk and you got a recipe for a major pain in the.. I am afraid the same people who really like to record voice messages will flock to this like moths to a lightbulb.
- rkagerer 3y agoflock to this like moths to a lightbulb In that sense it may act as a filter to help remove low-effort content from other channels I actually use (ie. not video).
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- JohnMakin 3y agoIMO it's because literacy rates are in the toilet.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y agoIs it the cause or the effect?
- atoav 3y agoThe future of presentations is the web — at least for me reveal.js is everything that I ever wanted for presentations. It can do video, it can do interactive stuff, it can do everything the web can do.
- tmpz22 3y agoHard not to see this as a way to sell mid-roll ads which have high engagement. Ad companies probably prefer video based tutorials to reference documentation.
- dan_hawkins 3y ago"The main goal is to make everything as easy as possible, says Kristina Behr, Google’s VP of product management for the Workspace collaboration apps." Looking up Kristina Behr on LI it looks like she jumped ships from MS to Google slightly over a year ago. At MS' last post she's been responsible for "Empowering frontline workers to achieve more with comms-first productivity and workflow solutions" listing following achievements: * Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet | Microsoft 365 Blog * Microsoft Teams for frontline workers: What's Live and Coming Soon and so on... Yeah, I'll pass :)
- alberth 3y agoLoom Loom is quite popular. Seems like Google has noticed. https://www.loom.com/ https://www.loom.com/
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- xnx 3y agoThere's an interesting background about information theory in relation to all these AI tools. If a small bit of input can be easily expanded into a video, there probably wasn't much novel information in the first place.
- nikolay 3y agoWork, really?