Synthesia

Synthesia is a UK company’s AI avatar video platform, and one of the first in the category to sell into large enterprises. Its idea is clear: rather than chasing creativity or spectacle, it replaces “find a presenter, film, edit” with “write a script, pick an avatar, click generate”, so companies can cheaply produce training courses, product explainers and internal announcements at scale.

Compared with avatar tools for individual creators, it behaves more like enterprise software: brand templates, team collaboration and review workflows, quick conversion of one video into many languages, and noticeable investment in security, compliance and permissions. For a company producing standardised content for staff or customers around the world, those matter more than whether an avatar looks perfectly human.

The flip side is that it is a poor fit for expressive content. Avatars have a limited range of expressions and gestures, and they start to feel mechanical over longer videos. Chinese voices are less natural than English ones, and pricing is not friendly to individuals. Moderation is strict, and political and news topics are restricted.

Key features

• Avatar library: A large range of stock avatars across ages, genders and styles; choose one and enter a script to generate a presenter video.
• Custom avatars: Record real footage to create a personal avatar, which requires the explicit consent of the person filmed.
• Multilingual voiceover and translation: Voices in many languages and accents, and fast translation of a video into other language versions.
• Templates and brand kits: Plenty of scene templates, with company logos, fonts and colours applied consistently.
• AI-assisted drafts: Generate a script and first-draft video from a document or web page, then edit it.
• Team collaboration: Multi-user editing, comments, reviews and version history for internal content workflows.

How to use

1. Sign up on the Synthesia website and use the free tier or a trial to learn the workflow.
2. Pick a template, or import a document or web page to draft a script.
3. For each scene, choose an avatar, language and voice, then adjust on-screen text, images and backgrounds.
4. Preview, refine the script and pauses scene by scene, and generate the full video.
5. Use translation for other language versions, and have a speaker of that language review the result.

Best for

• Corporate training and onboarding: standardised content that changes often is easier to regenerate than to reshoot.
• Product explainers and tutorials: edit the script and regenerate instead of recording again.
• Multilingual distribution: quickly produce language versions of the same material for global teams.
• Internal communications: a low-cost alternative to dry text announcements.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

• A complete enterprise feature set, with mature collaboration, brand management and access control.
• Strong multilingual capabilities and efficient translation into multiple versions.
• Updates only require editing the script and regenerating, keeping maintenance cheap.

Limitations

• Limited avatar expressions and gestures feel mechanical over time; not suitable for content that needs emotional pull.
• Chinese voices are less natural than English; test Chinese content before committing.
• Expensive for individuals, and the free tier does very little.
• Custom avatars require the subject’s consent, and political or news content faces strict moderation.