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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.

AI news brief: Japanese drone stocks have surged on military demand, with capital rotating from traditional defense names that already rallied last year toward the drone supply chain, which hasn’t been fully priced in yet. The backdrop: investors are hunting for diversified growth themes beyond AI stocks, so they’re shifting their gaze from traditional defense to this relatively new military-industrial sub-sector. See the original link for detailed mechanics, specific names, and capital scale involved. …

AI News Brief: Kawasaki Heavy Industries has announced a partnership with US chip giant Nvidia to co-develop the next generation of ‘AI-driven shipyards,’ aiming to leverage Nvidia’s digital twin (digital twin) technology to boost production efficiency and address the chronic labor shortage facing Japan’s shipbuilding industry. Beyond building AI-centric smart shipyards…

AI News Brief: Nvidia GPU server prices are too high, driving up infrastructure costs for Japanese AI companies and pushing the industry to look for cheaper alternatives. There are two main directions right now: first, adopting NPU (Neural Processing Unit) semiconductor chips to replace or complement GPUs — for example, the NPU developed by Korean chip startup Rebellions is already being used in some AI data center servers; second, offloading compute and data access load through cache servers instead of simply piling on more GPUs.