Veo 3 was unveiled at Google I/O 2025 by CEO Sundar Pichai. It was developed by DeepMind and is Google’s most advanced AI video generation model to date. It is capable of producing high-resolution, 4K videos with synchronized audio—a major leap from Veo 2.
Key Technical Features of Veo 3
Veo 3 accepts both text and image prompts, giving creators greater control over visual style and scene consistency.
- Audio-Visual Generation – Generates synchronized dialogue, sound effects, and background audio in real time
- Higher Resolution & Visual Quality – Delivers realistic Full HD and 4K videos with natural motion and visual consistency through advanced diffusion-transformer architecture and improved understanding of physics
- Input Modalities – Generates videos from text and image prompts
- Lip-Sync & Character Animation – Features advanced lip-syncing and lifelike character animation, delivering smoother, more realistic motion and speech alignment than its predecessor
- Narrative Coherence – Turns complex, multi-scene prompts into coherent mini-films by following narrative sequences and maintaining consistent characters and settings
Veo 3 Capabilities and Use Cases
Veo 3 is a powerful tool that opens up a range of creative capabilities for content creators, filmmakers, and general users. Some of the key things Veo 3 can do include:
<Alt text: Veo 3 sample text-to-video generation>
Text-to-Video Generation
Given a textual prompt, Veo 3 can generate a complete video clip from scratch. Users describe a scene, and the model generates a matching video. This includes rendering the visuals, animating any described actions, and adding relevant audio.
For example, a prompt describing “a timelapse of the northern lights dancing over an Arctic sky” would result in a vivid video of auroras moving across a starry night, with appropriate atmospheric sounds.
The model understands nuanced language about camera angles or art styles as well. One can specify “a drone shot over a jungle” or “animated in a watercolor style”, and Veo 3 will adjust the output accordingly.
This ability to go from imagination to video lowers the barrier for video creation, enabling anyone (even without filming or animation skills) to create high-quality footage by simply describing their vision.
Image-Guided and Stylized Video
Veo 3 supports image input to guide video generation. Users can supply an image as a reference for characters, objects, or the style of the video.
For instance, providing a photo of a character along with a text prompt allows the model to generate a video where the character’s appearance or the art style matches the reference.
This feature is useful for maintaining visual consistency across scenes. You can ensure the same protagonist appears in multiple shots, or that the video adopts a specific cinematic color grading or animation style by giving a style example.
Veo 3 performs style transfer and character conditioning so that the output aligns with the user’s creative intent. This makes it possible to generate an entire animated sequence in the style of a particular illustrator or to have an AI-generated actor resemble a provided character design.
Integrated Audio (Dialogue & Soundtrack)
One of Veo 3’s flagship capabilities is producing audio that is synchronized with the generated video. This means it can create talking characters – the model will generate the character’s voice lines as specified in the prompt and animate the character’s mouth to match.
It can also add appropriate sound effects and ambient background audio to enhance realism: imagine hearing the hustle and bustle of city traffic in a street scene, or gentle bird songs in a forest scene, exactly matching what is on screen.
Veo 3 can even produce simple musical scores or ambient music if the scene calls for it (for example, a prompt might request “a light orchestral music playing during a touching moment,” and the model will generate a fitting instrumental score in the background). These audio elements are created in real time, making the final video feel complete rather than silent. This enhances storytelling by letting the AI set both the tone and voice of the scene.
Storytelling and Multi-Scene Sequences
Users can write a prompt that describes a series of events or a short narrative, and Veo 3 will generate a video that follows the narrative thread from beginning to end.
For example, a single prompt could outline a mini story: “A wise old owl finds a mysterious object and discusses it with a nervous badger in the forest; the scene then shows the owl flying away and the badger running in another direction as dawn breaks”.
Veo 3 can generate multi-shot videos that follow a full narrative, complete with dialogue and sound. Its strong prompt adherence and temporal reasoning let it remember and execute story elements in order. This allows creators to produce complex, story-driven videos—ideal for pre-visualization, storyboarding, or full AI-generated films.
Cinematic Techniques and Control
Veo 3 has been trained with feedback from filmmakers and video creators, so it is adept at applying cinematic techniques in the generated videos. It understands terminology for camera movements and scene composition.
A user can request things like “a slow pan across the room”, “an aerial drone shot over the mountains”, or “rack focus from the foreground flower to the mountains in the distance”, and Veo 3 will attempt to incorporate those cinematic styles in the output.
The model can also handle various genres and tones – whether the prompt asks for a Hollywood-style action scene, a cartoonish kids’ animation, or an abstract experimental video, Veo 3 adjusts its output to fit the description.
Veo 3 and Flow: Precision Video Creation
Google has additionally introduced a tool called Flow (an AI filmmaking interface) that works with Veo 3 to give creators even more control, such as timeline editing, camera path specification, and combining multiple generated clips into a longer narrative. In Flow, Veo 3 can be directed shot-by-shot, allowing for refined control over the final video composition.
Integration with Gemini and Imagen
Veo 3 is part of Google’s broader generative AI ecosystem and is designed to integrate with other AI models for a richer creative workflow. In the Gemini app (Google’s AI companion platform), Veo 3 works alongside the Gemini language model.
For example, a user could have Gemini (an advanced LLM) help script or refine a prompt, then pass it to Veo 3 to generate the video. Likewise, Google’s Imagen 4 (text-to-image model) complements Veo 3: users might generate high-quality images with Imagen and use them as reference or starting frames for Veo to animate.
Flow, mentioned above, actually brings these together. It allows creators to “weave your narrative into beautiful scenes” by leveraging Veo 3 for video, Imagen for images, and Gemini for understanding complex instructions in one tool. This integration means Veo 3 can be used in multi-modal creative projects – for instance, a game designer could use Imagen to create concept art, Gemini to generate a story or script, and Veo 3 to turn it into an animated storyboard.
All content (video, image, text) is part of a unified pipeline in Google’s generative suite. Such synergy with other tools (including potential integration with Google’s music generator Lyria 2 for background music) positions Veo 3 as a component in end-to-end content creation workflows rather than a standalone toy.
Accessibility and Availability
As of its launch, Veo 3 is being rolled out in a limited, premium access model. General availability is restricted, with priority given to paid subscribers and enterprise customers:
Gemini App (AI Ultra Plan)
The primary way to access Veo 3 is through the Google Gemini app (Google’s generative AI consumer app), but it requires a subscription to the Google AI Pro or Ultra plan.
Starting in late May 2025, U.S. users on the Ultra plan can use Veo 3 within the Gemini mobile and web apps. The Ultra subscription costs $249.99 per month in the U.S. (with an initial promotional discount for early subscribers). This plan unlocks Veo 3 along with other top-tier AI models (like the advanced Gemini 2.5 LLM and Imagen 4).
In practical terms, only users who upgrade to this high-end plan can generate videos with Veo 3 at this time. Google has indicated that Ultra plan access to these features will expand to more countries soon as they scale up the service.
Enterprise Access (Vertex AI)
Beyond the consumer app, Veo 3 is also being offered to enterprises and developers via Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. Through Vertex AI, companies and app developers can integrate Veo 3’s video generation via API into their own products or workflows.
Initially, Veo 3 on Vertex is in a preview/allowlist stage. Interested enterprise customers likely have to apply or be approved to gain access. Pricing on Vertex is usage-based.
For example, generating video via Veo 3 on the cloud API was listed at about $0.50–0.75 per second of video. Enterprise users can thus experiment with Veo 3 to automatically create video content (for advertising, video games, simulation, etc.) with the assurance of Google Cloud’s infrastructure. This platform access also means Veo 3 could be integrated into tools like YouTube (for creators, via the Dream Screen feature) or Google’s business applications in the future.
Geographic and Expansion Plans
As of today, Veo 3 is available in 73 countries, including the United States. The company has stated that it plans to expand availability to additional countries over time, likely once they handle scaling and address any ethical/safety concerns in other regions.
It’s worth noting that Flow, the AI filmmaking tool built around Veo 3, is available to a subset of users as well (those on the Pro or Ultra plans in the U.S.). As Google expands its generative AI programs, features like Veo 3 are expected to trickle down to more user tiers or see wider release, but the company is taking a phased approach. In summary, as of mid-2025 Veo 3 is only available to paying subscribers, with gradual expansion envisioned.
Veo 3 vs Sora
Veo 3 enters the scene amid competition in AI video generation, notably from OpenAI’s Sora model. OpenAI’s Sora was first announced in early 2024 and moved out of research preview by the end of 2024, making it one of the first text-to-video models available to the public.
A comparison of Veo 3 and Sora reveals some key differences in features and performance:
Audio Generation
Perhaps the most striking difference is that Google’s Veo 3 generates audio natively along with the video, whereas OpenAI’s Sora produces silent videos by default. Veo 3 can embed character dialogues, sound effects, and background noise directly into its output, greatly enhancing realism.
By contrast, Sora (at least as of its 2024 release) did not include audio generation – any sound or voice would have to be added separately by the user in post-production. This gives Veo 3 a significant advantage for creators who want a one-stop solution; as noted in news coverage, “unlike OpenAI’s Sora, Veo 3 sets itself apart with its ability to embed audio directly into the videos it produces”.
In practical terms, a video from Sora is more like a mute clip (e.g. an animation or live-action scene without sound), whereas a Veo 3 video comes out as a complete scene with both visuals and audio in sync.
Visual Fidelity and Resolution
Veo 3 offers higher resolution output and potentially more photorealistic visuals compared to Sora’s initial capabilities.
OpenAI’s Sora supports video generation up to 1080p resolution and around 20 seconds in length for each clip under its current release. Google’s Veo 3, on the other hand, is capable of 4K resolution output, delivering more detail and clarity in frames (useful for big-screen or professional use cases).
Veo 3’s videos have been touted as having superior visual realism, benefitting from Google’s advances in diffusion models and training on cinematic data. Sora’s output is high quality, but early users noted that it sometimes had artifacting or less detail, especially at higher resolutions, whereas Veo 3’s 4K clips appear sharp and lifelike.
It’s worth mentioning that Sora’s length per generation is capped (~20s) for now, likely due to computational limits, while Google has hinted that Veo 3 can handle longer narratives (Veo 2 could already extend to ~60 seconds, and Veo 3 builds on that). This means Veo 3 might produce a longer continuous video than Sora can, enabling more complex scenes.
Coherence and Complexity
Both models aim to accurately reflect the user’s prompt, but Google emphasizes that Veo 3 handles complex, multi-scene prompts with greater accuracy in following the described sequence. OpenAI’s Sora has shown impressive prompt adherence for single scenes, but according to OpenAI it still “struggles with complex actions over long durations” and sometimes exhibits unrealistic physics in generated videos.
In fact, OpenAI’s own documentation acknowledges that Sora can produce odd results for extended or intricate prompts. If you ask for a long sequence of many events, Sora might lose consistency or violate physics (objects appearing/disappearing incorrectly, etc.).
Veo 3 was trained with a strong focus on temporal consistency and physical realism, helping it maintain believable motion and storyline continuity. For example, it can smoothly animate a ball being thrown and a dog chasing it in one natural sequence. This gives Veo 3 an edge in realistic world simulation over models like Sora.
Input Flexibility
Sora and Veo 3 both accept text and image inputs, but Sora also introduced a feature where users can provide video clips as input to “extend or remix” them.
OpenAI built a storyboard and editing interface for Sora, allowing users to specify certain frames or upload short video snippets to guide generation (for instance, continuing a video from a starting frame, or combining two videos). Google’s Veo 3 (especially when used via the Flow tool or Vertex AI) similarly allows starting from an image or extending a clip, but its consumer interface in the Gemini app is primarily prompt-driven.
In essence, both aim to give creators control: Sora has a storyboard tool for precise per-frame control, while Google provides things like Flow’s timeline and camera controls. Neither model is strictly limited to just “type and generate”; they each support iterative refinement. However, these advanced controls might be more user-friendly in Sora’s interface at the moment, whereas some of Veo 3’s fine controls (like masking objects or specifying camera paths) are accessible through Flow or Vertex AI rather than the basic app.
Availability and Cost
OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have very different availability models.
Sora was rolled out to ChatGPT users. It is included for free (up to certain limits) with a standard ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) subscription.
ChatGPT Plus users as of late 2024 could use Sora to generate a number of videos per month (e.g. 50 at 480p or a smaller number at 720p, with higher resolutions and more generations available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers). This means Sora has reached a quite broad audience quickly, as many existing ChatGPT Plus users gained access at no extra cost.
Veo 3, in contrast, is behind a much costlier paywall (Google’s $250/mo Ultra plan) and initially US-only. Its reach at launch is therefore more limited.
Enterprise-wise, both companies are making their video models available via APIs: OpenAI’s Sora API (to select partners) and Google’s Vertex AI for Veo. But from an individual user’s perspective, Sora is currently more accessible (assuming one has a ChatGPT Plus account) whereas Veo 3 is aimed at premium and professional users in this early phase.
Over time, this may change – Google might integrate Veo into more consumer services, and OpenAI might adjust Sora’s pricing – but as of mid-2025, Sora is the more accessible option while Veo 3 is the higher-end, arguably more advanced option.
In Summary
Google’s Veo 3 and OpenAI’s Sora are top-tier text-to-video AI models, but they serve different priorities. Veo 3 focuses on high-quality output with 4K visuals, built-in audio, and advanced storytelling features, appealing to professional creators. Sora, while more accessible and user-friendly, currently produces silent, shorter clips but is evolving quickly. As both platforms mature, we may see greater feature parity, with creators watching closely how each addresses quality, access, and responsible use.
Want to learn more? Read the complete guide to AI Art and Image Generators.
