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London-based Synthesia, a startup that helps businesses create professional AI videos, announced a major update to its platform today. This update, named Synthesia 2.0, aims to enhance video-first communication for enterprises by introducing several new capabilities. These include full-body avatars with a range of motions, an interactive video experience with engaging elements like calendars and forms, and a new AI screen recorder to simplify the creation of instructional videos and other content.
While Synthesia previously announced expressive avatars, it’s important to note that not all features will be available immediately. Some will launch next month, and others will roll out over the coming months.
Synthesia was founded in 2017 by a team of AI researchers and entrepreneurs from Stanford, Technical University of Munich, and Cambridge. The goal was to help businesses shift from dull text-based content to engaging video content. Over the years, they developed a platform where businesses can create custom AI voices and avatars, using pre-written or AI-generated scripts to produce videos.
Today, Synthesia is used by over 55,000 businesses including Zoom, Dupont, Heineken, and Electrolux. The company has enhanced its AI avatars to be more realistic and expressive. Recently, they introduced a new model, Express-1, which enables avatars to understand the context and sentiment of text, adjusting their tone and expressions accordingly.
With the latest update, Synthesia is further enhancing its avatars’ storytelling abilities by expanding their range of motion. This will allow the digital characters to use a full range of human body language, including hand gestures, to make their storytelling more engaging.
Dan-Vlad Cobasneanu, Synthesia’s head of product marketing, explained that these improved avatars are the result of training large video and audio models with data from thousands of people worldwide. These avatars will be fully controllable, allowing users to specify appearance and create animations using skeleton sequences.
In addition, Synthesia is making it easier for users to create personal avatars using webcams or mobile cameras. CEO Victor Riparbelli mentioned that this will be particularly useful for authentic-looking tutorials. The personal avatars will have better lip-syncing and more natural voices, and can translate speech into over 30 languages.
The new interactive video player will allow users to add clickable hotspots to their content. Viewers can interact with elements like forms, calendars, or quizzes, or navigate to specific parts of the video. This feature will be available in a few months, starting with the ability to change the language and displayed content of the video.
Synthesia is also introducing an AI screen recorder which will initially function like a standard screen recorder. Once recording stops, the system will generate a professional-grade AI video, complete with speaker audio and transcription. Users can then edit the video to add avatars and zoom effects, and update the script if needed.
Other updates in Synthesia 2.0 include the addition of brand kits for incorporating brand identity into videos, bulk content generation through an AI-powered assistant, new collaboration features for multiple users to work on the same project, and improved one-click translation.
It will be interesting to see how these new features impact Synthesia’s adoption, particularly given its focus on enterprise applications with a collaborative and moderation-driven approach. Competing companies in this space include Deepbrain AI, Rephrase, and HeyGen.