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AI News Brief: Google has added a personalized AI avatar feature to its video tool Vids, letting users star in their own AI-generated videos. Powered by Gemini Omni, the feature can generate and edit video content from text prompts and reference images. The original article doesn’t go into further technical detail on the avatar creation workflow, video length limits, or editable scope — see the source link for the full story.

AI News Brief: 44 Japanese companies jointly launched a sovereign AI foundation model development plan on July 16, led by SoftBank, Sony, and Honda, aiming to train proprietary AI with their own data to safeguard Japan’s manufacturing position in global competition amid the widening US-China gap in frontier AI. The plan has partnered with NVIDIA, with Tokyo procuring 27,500 Rubin chips to support ‘physical AI’ R&D in robotics, factory automation, and real-world interaction applications rather than cloud-based language models.

AI News Brief: ASEAN has favorable conditions for deploying AI humanoid robots in manufacturing and logistics centers, according to a senior AI industry executive speaking at a panel discussion at the Nikkei Asia Forum APAC 2026 in Bangkok on July 16. The executive noted that the prevalence of manual labor in Southeast Asia actually creates a favorable data collection environment — abundant repetitive human work scenarios provide rich sources of motion and perception data needed to train humanoid robots, accelerating AI robot deployment in local manufacturing and logistics settings. Humanoid robots performed a dancing demo on-site as part of the technology showcase. The original summary did not provide specific deployment timelines, investment scale, or partner details; see the original link for full coverage.

AI news brief: Google Vids is rolling out two new features — Gemini Omni and personal avatars — to make video creation and editing easier. Back in February, Google already opened Veo 3.1 to all users to help with video generation; now Gemini Omni is further integrated into Vids, where users just type a natural language prompt and can add image references (like photos or sketches) to supply extra detail, and the system blends these inputs to produce a video that matches the brief. Omni also supports iterative, chat-style editing — whether the video was generated by Omni or shot on a phone, users can use everyday language to swap backgrounds, fix lighting, or add effects, and keep tweaking without starting from scratch. Personal avatars let users ‘appear on camera’ in a video without actually being on camera: upload a selfie and a short voice recording, type out what you want to say, and the avatar will deliver the message in your likeness and voice. Both features are currently available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers as well as Google Workspace business customers; personal avatars are restricted to specific regions, users aged 18+, and the avatar is tied to the user’s Google account, limited to the account holder’s appearance. To keep content transparent, every generated video is embedded with an invisible SynthID digital watermark so others can verify whether a video was AI-generated, helping users share AI video creations more responsibly.

AI News Brief: Cars24, one of India’s largest used car e-commerce platforms, recently deployed voice and text customer service agents built on OpenAI technology and has expanded their use to the daily workflows of multiple internal teams. The system handles over 1 million minutes of conversation per month, demonstrating substantial customer service scale. More notably, these AI agents successfully recovered 12% of previously lost leads, meaning sales opportunities once lost to slow response times, limited hours, or insufficient human coverage can now be reached and converted in real time by 24/7 voice and text agents, directly impacting revenue. Beyond customer service, Cars24 is also rolling out these agentic workflows to other internal teams, signaling a shift toward organization-wide AI agent adoption rather than a single department’s tool. The original summary does not elaborate on specific model versions, technical architecture details, implementation timeline, or the calculation basis for the 12% recovery rate — see the source link for details. Overall, this is a case where AI voice and text agents deliver measurable business results in a high-transaction, high-churn used car marketplace.

AI News Brief: OpenAI is rolling out safer ChatGPT mechanisms for teen users, featuring age-appropriate protections, learning assistance tools, parental monitoring features, and collaboration with external experts to strengthen safety for minors. Full details available at the original link. …

AI News Brief: Nvidia announced a partnership with Toyota Motor’s smart city experimental project ‘Woven City’ (operated by Woven by Toyota), focused on ‘physical AI’ technologies. Woven City is a demonstration experimental city built by Toyota in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, used to test various smart city and future mobility technologies. Accor…

AI news brief: A joint report by Visa and blockchain data platform Artemis points to concrete signals of machine-to-machine (machine-native) micropayment adoption, with Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol as the leading example. Since launching in May 2025, x402 has processed approximately $15 million in adjusted transaction volume with over 109 million adjusted transactions…

AI News Brief: Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs have recently published their joint bioresilience strategy, centered on two pillars: preventing AI models from being misused by threat actors while helping governments, scientists, and biosecurity experts leverage AI to strengthen societal resilience. Over the past 12 months, the two organizations have established partnerships with more than 15 government agencies, biosecurity organizations, and research teams…

Taiwan is accelerating its homegrown generative AI model TAIDE to protect local language and culture, countering how mainstream models tend to skew toward mainland Chinese phrasing and values because their training data is heavy on mainland Chinese content. TAIDE is built on an open-source base model, then layered with Taiwan-specific data for training and fine-tuning.