TechCrunch reports that Google is working on a new feature called YouTube Stories, and it sounds similar to Apple’s Clips app. You record a few videos—called Reels— up to 30 seconds each, and you can add filters, music, text, or background.

YouTube Stories

YouTube Stories will be rolling out gradually. If you see the option in the app, you’re a beta tester. One of the features that Google talks about is adding backgrounds to your videos. The company uses machine learning in real time to separate you from your background, called video segmentation:

• Empty previous mask – Trains the network to work correctly for the first frame and new objects in scene. This emulates the case of someone appearing in the camera’s frame.
• Affine transformed ground truth mask – Minor transformations train the network to propagate and adjust to the previous frame mask. Major transformations train the network to understand inadequate masks and discard them.
• Transformed image – We implement thin plate spline smoothing of the original image to emulate fast camera movements and rotations.

Then, you can choose a different background from a selection of presets, like light leak, dance party, studio tint, and more. Eventually Google plans to integrate this technology into its broader augmented reality services. If you find yourself a beta tester, you should find a Reels tab in your channel settings.