Synthesia Launches AI Avatars for Interactive Training

Synthesia Launches AI Avatars for Interactive Training

For years, Synthesia's proposition has been to use AI to help companies create interactive training videos in just minutes, at a fraction of the cost typically associated with developing corporate educational materials. The startup's latest product takes a different approach: that the real competitive advantage in AI for businesses lies not just in content generation, but in proving its effectiveness.

On Wednesday, the British startup launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product where employees can practice high-stakes conversations, such as sales presentations, performance reviews, and customer complaints, with an AI avatar that responds, challenges, and evaluates them based on a set of criteria.

Roleplay is the first release from a broader platform called “Sessions” that Synthesia plans to expand to other formats, including job interviews and candidate screening, TechCrunch learned exclusively.

This launch comes as companies are scrutinizing whether their AI spending is paying off. Citing a meta-analysis of research on learning, Synthesia argues that most corporate training—including, implicitly, its own flagship video product—fails to actually change behaviors. Training tends to inform and demonstrate, but what really drives someone to learn something is practicing it, accompanied by feedback.

“Video works much better than text or sending a document,” said Synthesia CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli to TechCrunch. “But for most things, we learn best by actually practicing something rather than just reading about it.”

Roleplay also allows Synthesia to position itself more defensively. The company's avatar and voice technology is proprietary, but the underlying intelligence is from OpenAI. By adding a layer that includes criteria grids, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia positions itself less as an AI avatar company and more as a performance management platform with a video interface.

“From the perspective of an executive management layer, we see a great interest in mapping talent within their company in a way that was really difficult to do before,” Riparbelli said. “If you have your entire sales team practice with an AI role player, you can get very granular data on the overall performance of your sales force.”

Synthesia already has a few early clients for Roleplay with large-scale commercial deployments, including “one of the three largest companies by market capitalization in Europe, one of the top five companies in the Fortune 100, and one of the largest recruitment companies in the world,” according to a company spokesperson.

The two most popular use cases involve training sales teams and leadership—programs like practicing product sales or managing a difficult conversation. A significant part of this is focused on interpersonal skills training, Riparbelli clarified.

As with Synthesia's main product, clients can either create their own training programs on the platform or seek assistance from Synthesia's consultants to build a custom solution that partially relies on the training documents and context that the company already possesses.

Roleplay is currently an offering aimed at enterprises, but the goal is to make it more widely available to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the coming months, as inference costs continue to decline. Riparbelli believes that products like Roleplay represent the next phase of AI adoption in business, where companies care less about whether AI looks good in a social media demo and more about proving it generates measurable business results.