From Blog to Video Using AI – iHeart
From Blog to Video Using AI
After my recent experiment with Claude.AI to rewrite a blog post, I’ve been thinking about AI’s role in content creation more broadly. While written posts work well for some audiences, I know many people prefer consuming content through video. This led me to question whether AI could help bridge that gap by transforming my written Substack posts into video content.
Enter Google Vids and its new AI-powered “Help Me Create” feature, which promises to automatically generate videos from existing content. As someone with limited experience creating videos from scratch, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to test whether AI could lower the barrier to video content creation for me.
Why Google Vids?
Google Vids is primarily designed for workplace use cases—customer support, project management, and marketing according to its website. However, the feature that caught my attention was its ability to work directly with content stored in Google Drive. Since I already draft my blog posts in Google Docs, the integration seemed seamless.
The tool is included with Google Workspace business plans and accessible at workspace.google.com/products/vids.
The AI Video Creation Process
The workflow is surprisingly straightforward. Google Vids can import content directly from a Google Doc, then automatically:
* Creates a storyboard based on your written content
* Suggests video templates that match your content type
* Generates a script adapted for video format
* Selects relevant video clips from stock footage
* Produces default narration using AI voice synthesis
The entire initial video generation took less than five minutes—remarkable considering I started with just a text document.
What Worked Well
The interface should feel familiar to anyone who has used Google Slides. The AI did a decent job of identifying key points from my blog post and structuring them into a logical video sequence. The automatic script generation was particularly impressive, taking my written paragraphs and adapting them into streamlined, video-appropriate copy.
Where AI Fell Short
However, the automatically-generated video felt a bit impersonal to me. I felt that the AI struggled to capture my personal tone. The stock footage selections, while technically relevant, didn’t capture the specific context of my original post.
Three specific issues stood out:
* The AI voice narration lacked the conversational tone I try to convey in my writing
* Stock video clips were too generic and didn’t match my personal experiences
* The outline seemed like a corporate slide presentation and not a personal narrative
My Customizations
To address these issues at least in part, I made three manual modifications:
1. Recorded a personal narration: I replaced the AI-generated voice with my own recording. I hope this made the rest of the video feel just a bit more authentic.
2. Added a custom intro video clip: I filmed a brief intro segment to at least set the stage that this was my creation. I did disclose in my recorded introduction that this video was done by AI, as I always try to disclose when I am using AI.
3. Chose alternate stock footage: I replaced one of Google’s chosen stock clips with diffe
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