This article was published on October 30, 2020

Google’s new AI automatically turns webpages into videos


Google’s new AI automatically turns webpages into videos

If you have a product webpage, you’d wish that you could create a handy video to show to clients with all the info. However, you might not have the budget to hire someone to make it. To solve that, Google’s AI team is working on a future solution that automatically converts webpages into videos.

Google’s URL2Video tool helps you convert your website into a short video if you specify the constraints of the output video, such as the duration and aspect ratio. The tool tries to maintain the design language of the source page and uses its elements such as the text, images, and clips to create a new video.

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To train the model, the company interviewed designers to determine important aspects of a webpage derived from heuristics. Based on these parameters, the tool analyzes a page and ranks key elements. Then based on conditions provided by the users, it selects top elements such as headers and images to churn out a video.

Credit: Google AI
By extracting the structural content and design from the input web page, URL2Video makes automatic editing decisions to present key messages in a video

Once the video is generated, you can change colors and style to regenerate the footage according to your needs. You can see an example of the tool being used to create a video for Google Search below.

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Credit: Google AI
URL2Video identifies key content from our Google Search introduction page (top), including headings and video assets.

Google’s not the only company working on this. Baidu has built and rolled out an AI in the limited capacity that can generate news videos with voice over using a single URL.

In the future, Google’s AI team wants to add the ability to add audio tracks and voiceovers during the editing process.

You can read about the tool’s technical details in this paper.

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