Synthesia no longer just makes videos: it wants AI avatars to respond to you on the spot and give you a score. For many years, Synthesia’s signature has been using AI to help companies create interactive training videos in a few minutes, at a fraction of the cost of traditional corporate teaching materials.

Synthesia no longer just makes videos: it wants AI avatars to respond to you on the spot and give you a score. For many years, Synthesia's signature has been using AI to help companies create interactive training videos in a few minutes, at a fraction of the cost of traditional corporate teaching materials. Now the British startup is making another bet: The real moat for enterprise AI may lie not in generating content, but in proving that "it really works." On Wednesday, Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training product. There, employees can rehearse high-stakes conversations—sales pitches, performance interviews, customer complaints, etc.—with an AI avatar that talks back, rebuts you, and ultimately rates you on a rating scale. This is the first product under Synthesia's larger "Session" platform, and TechCrunch has learned exclusively that this platform will also expand to include interviews, candidate screening and other forms. This move comes at a time when companies are re-examining whether AI spending is worth it. Citing a meta-analysis of learning research, Synthesia pointed out that most corporate training - including its own core video products - actually stop before "changing behavior": they are good at informing and demonstrating, but what really pushes people into a learning state is doing it by themselves, plus feedback. "Video is much better than plain text or sending a document," CEO and co-founder Victor Ripabelli told TechCrunch, "but for most things, our best way to learn is not to read, but to actually practice." Roleplay has also moved Synthesia to a more stable position. The company's avatar and voice technology are self-developed, but the underlying reasoning intelligence comes from OpenAI. Once you add the layers of rating scales, performance data, and analytics, Synthesia becomes more like a performance management platform with a video facade than a pure AI incarnation company. "From a management perspective, we see a strong interest - it used to be difficult to understand the distribution of talent in the company, but now it can be done," said Rippabelli. "If you let the entire sales team practice with the AI ​​role, you can get very fine-grained data to see how the team is performing as a whole." Synthesia has several early Roleplay customers who have made large-scale commercial deployments, including "one of the top three companies in Europe by market capitalization, one of the top five Fortune 100 companies, and one of the largest recruitment companies in the world." The two most popular scenarios right now are sales team and leadership training - such as practicing how to sell products and how to negotiate a difficult situation.