News
Saudi Arabia’s Vegetation Monitoring Receives An AI Upgrade
The new program will contribute to the Kingdom’s Green Initiative.
Saudi Arabia is around 2 million square kilometers in area, with multiple terrain types and a diverse mixture of vegetation, including forests, pastures, coastlines, and islands. Now, the government is deploying AI and remote sensing to make studying and monitoring these environments more efficient.
The new program to evaluate and study vegetation cover via remote sensing and AI was announced by Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Environment, Water, and Agriculture, Abdulrahman Al-Fadhli. The initiative will help to drive afforestation projects and the Saudi Green Initiative.
Khaled Bin Abdullah Al-Abdulqadir, CEO of the National Center for Vegetation Development and Combating Desertification (NCVC), explained that the goal is to monitor changes in vegetation cover at the sites of afforestation projects, calculate rainfall, and monitor and control local plant health.
Also Read: Saudi Arabia And UAE Join The Global Rush For AI Dominance
AI and remote sensing techniques will also allow drones to monitor mangrove forests stretching across the kingdom’s coastlines. The surveys will calculate the number of trees and follow up on sand encroachment and its impact.
News
Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users
The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.
Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.
Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.
Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.
Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.
Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide
To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.
While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.
Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.
Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users
PayPal & TerraPay Join Forces For Cross-Border MENA Payments
Influencer Growth Fuels Saudi Creator Economy Surge
Dubai Integrates LiDAR & Digital Twins For Road Management
