Elai Review: Is It Worth the Investment?

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Elai Quick Facts

My Rating: 4.1 / 5

Pricing:

• Free to $100 per month
• Customer enterprise pricing

Key Features:

• AI-driven avatars and voiceovers
• More than 100 customizable templates
• Content repurposing tools (PPTX-to-video, text-to-video)
• Support for more than 75 languages
• LMS, automation, and marketing tools integrations

Elai is an AI-powered video creation platform designed to simplify the production of professional videos. The software falls into the broader category of AI video creation tools, which use generative AI to create content and automate parts of the production process.

Elai excels at transforming text-based content like blog posts, PDFs, or PowerPoint presentations into dynamic videos with minimal effort. This makes it a great fit for corporate training, marketing teams, and educators who need to create content quickly and at scale. But it’s not perfect. The AI avatars can feel stiff and robotic, the text-to-speech functionality isn’t the best out there, and the free plan is limited—it’s more of a teaser than a tier, and might push users into a paid plan faster than they’d like.

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Continue reading to learn more about Elai’s use cases, pricing, core features, ease of use, and customer support, or jump ahead to see how I scored it across six main categories.

Who Should Use Elai?

Theoretically, Elai can work in any setting where quick or high-volume video production is required. That said, it serves users in corporate training, marketing, and educational settings particularly well.

Corporate Training and Communications

Elai is a solid choice for corporate communications, especially for teams or departments that need to create professional-looking content without a large production budget. The platform offers a variety of templates designed for training and educational scenarios, including onboarding, compliance, health and safety, and skills development. With support for more than 75 languages, it also offers a viable means of managing training across geographies.

Marketing Teams

Elai’s ability to quickly generate videos and repurpose existing content makes it an attractive option for marketing teams. It can be used to create promotional presentations, pitch decks, and campaign reports without requiring advanced video production skills. Integrations with tools like Medium and Pexels means that marketers can easily add content from third-party sources too. Custom branding, including company logos, avatars, and voice cloning, is available in higher-tier plans.

Educators

Elai’s integration with learning management systems (LMS) like Thinkific and Moodle makes it useful across all kinds of e-learning environments, as does the platform’s multi-language support. Educators will also benefit from being able to turn PowerPoint presentations and PDFs into interactive videos and quizzes ideal for capturing the attention of easily-distracted eyeballs.

Who Shouldn’t Use Elai?

Elai might be accessible and versatile, but it won’t be the best fit for professional video editors or dynamic content creators seeking a personal feel.

Professional Video Editors

Professional video editors looking for more artistic direction over their content may find Elai comes up short—the platform is designed to simplify video production for users who lack advanced skills. This means Elai lacks the more granular control over effects, graphics, and transitions more advanced creators might be used to. In this regard, Elai isn’t comparable to the likes of Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro.

Individual Content Creators

Content creators who thrive on dynamic, YouTube-style content might find Elai’s reliance on AI avatars and presentation-style content limiting. While Elai offers templates for various content types, such as news and how-tos, it might not provide the personal touch and engagement that individual creators seek. For these users, a smartphone and basic video editing apps might be a more cost-effective option.

Elai Pricing

While I don’t recommend Elai’s free trial, the Basic plan is competitive for budget-focused video content creators.

Free Trial: Provides just one minute of free credit and one slide per render. For many users, this won’t be enough for a comprehensive test drive.

Basic Plan: Starts at $23 per month billed annually. Geared toward individual creators and small businesses, it offers 15 video minutes per month; additional minutes cost $2 each.

Advanced Plan: $100 per month. With advanced features geared for larger or growing teams, this plan offers 50 video minutes per month, a brand kit, premium voices, and 4K Ultra HD video avatars.

Custom: Contact Elai’s sales reps for a quote.

Elai also offers custom avatars as a premium add-on. The Selfie avatar costs $199 per year, whereas the studio avatar is priced at $859 per year, or $1,059 with voice cloning.

6 Key Features of Elai

Elai has an array of notable features that range from avatars that provide an AI-based spokesperson to storyboards, automation to speed up production, and a full menu of integrations to increase functionality.

AI Avatars and Voiceovers

Elai’s key selling point is its photorealistic AI avatars based on video recordings of live actors. These avatars act as digital presenters that narrate the content of the presentation or video to the audience. This can either be a script written by the user or created through GPT-3-powered generative AI. Similarly, the natural language processing-powered text-to-speech feature lets users create an AI voiceover for their videos.

While it’s undoubtedly a cool and futuristic use of generative AI, the avatars just didn’t sell it for me. They seemed expressionless and robotic, and the lip syncing didn’t quite match up to the voiceover. Then again, an AI avatar is not something I’d ever use anyway. I’d rather just read the text or listen to a human speak.

AI Storyboards and Automation

AI Storyboards take much of the effort away from structuring your videos by letting generative AI do the heavy lifting for you. You have a few options. You can either insert your own script and let Elai structure it into a cohesive video outline or storyboard, or—if you’re extremely writing-averse—simply tell Elai what your video is about and let it create both the script and the storyboard for you. If you don’t like what Elai produces, you can simply ask it to regenerate the outline until you’re happy with it, or tweak it yourself.

AI Storyboards is where Elai really shines as a time-saver and productivity booster for users with minimal video production experience. Busy teachers and marketing teams will find this particularly useful.

Customizable Templates

Elai offers many premade templates—more than 100, in fact—with options for business reports, pitch decks, onboarding, team building, employee wellbeing, promotional videos, workplace safety, Q&A sessions, cybersecurity training, how-tos, wedding invitations…the list goes on. Whatever your use case, you’ll likely find what you’re looking for.

As well as breadth of choice, Elai offers ample customization options, such as the ability to add custom branding, including logos, though this is locked to Advanced and higher plans. More recently, Elai introduced interactive features like quizzes, interactive timelines, and branching options, allowing for more dynamic and engaging videos.

Content Repurposing Tools

Elai makes it easy to inject new life into existing content. The PPTX-to-Video feature converts PowerPoint presentations into video slides, which is helpful for anyone who regularly uses slides in their work and wants to turn them into more engaging videos. Similarly, the text-to-video functionality offers a straightforward way to convert blog posts, PDFs, or articles into narrated videos, helping you maximize the utility of your existing content.

Multi-Language Support

With support for more than 75 languages, including both common and less-spoken languages, Elai is a strong choice for international businesses, educators, and content creators looking to reach a global audience. That said, it’s worth noting that Elai’s voice cloning feature is a paid add-on that only supports 28 languages.

Integrations

Elai offers a range of integrations that expand Elai’s functionality and support businesses’ existing workflows. Users can connect Elai with tools like Zapier for no-code workflow automation, Thinkific to create video courses, and Pexels to add stock photos and footage to their videos. Other integrations include Moodle for educational content, Medium for embedding videos in posts, and LottieFiles for adding animations.

Elai Ease of Use

Elai is widely praised for its user-friendly interface, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced users alike. The layout is straightforward and intuitive, and it didn’t take me long to figure out where everything was and how it worked—all the main features are just a few clicks away. If you’ve ever used Microsoft PowerPoint or something similar, using Elai will be a breeze. If you haven’t, video tutorials, customer support, and a help section are clearly signposted.

Elai Customer Service

While I didn’t run into any issues during my time with Elai, I appreciated the various options it offered for getting in touch with customer support (some of which I’ve touched on above). Elai offers email and chat channels, as well as the ability to raise a ticket via a dedicated support page. There’s also a knowledgebase full of information, how-tos, and other resources, plus the aforementioned video tutorials. Customer feedback on review sites generally claim that Elai’s customer support team is helpful and responsive.

Alternatives to Elai

Video creation platforms are launching quickly these days, and Elai is one of a large handful of platforms that are competing in the the market for AI-generated video content. Top alternatives include Synthesia, Lumen5, and Murf.ai.

Synthesia

Much like Elai, Synthesia offers interesting AI tools and a full slate of templates and customization options. Users cite Synthesia for the quality of its AI avatars, which come across as more convincing than Elai’s thanks to their more expressive features and better lip syncing.

Pricing starts at $29 per month, though at time of writing, Synthesia was running an introductory offer of $18 per month. That gets you access to more than 125 AI avatars plus three personal avatars, more than 60 templates, more than 140 languages and voices, and 120 minutes of video a year, among other features.

Lumen5

Lumen5 is known for its ease of use, making it a popular choice among businesses and individuals with less digital marketing expertise. It offers intuitive drag-and-drop tools and a variety of templates, as well as the ability to repurpose blogs, scripts, and RSS feeds into AI-generated videos.

Lumen5 also includes options like the ability to manage multiple brand kits and set up custom workspaces. While there are no AI avatars on offer here, the free Community plan allows users to create up to five videos a month, which is more generous than Elai’s free tier. Paid tiers start at $19 per month.

Muuf.ai

Murf.ai is an online text-to-speech platform that uses AI to turn text into reasonably realistic-sounding voice overs. It offers 120 voices in 20 different languages, which you can fine-tune by adjusting aspects like pitch, speed, emphasis, and pronunciation. Interestingly, Murf.ai also offers the ability for users to upload their own narrations and convert them into an AI voice. Pricing starts at $19 per month, which lets you create five projects and includes access to more than 200 voices, styles, and tonalities, and 24 hours of voice generation per year.

How I Evaluated Elai

For this Elai review, I assessed six key areas that are most important to prospective buyers. I divided each into weighted subcategories totalling an overall score out of five.

Evaluation Criteria

I placed the highest weight on core features, quality of output, and ease of use, followed by integrations, pricing, and customer support.

Core Features (30 percent): In my Elai review, I looked at what Elai offers in terms of basic editing tools, templates, and media handling, as well as its AI and automation tools. The goal was to see if it covers all the essentials for creating videos while also offering something unique with its AI-driven features.

Quality of Output (25 percent): My Elai AI review evaluated the quality of the content generated by Elai, including the resolution and how fast it could process and render videos. This also included assessing how convincing the AI avatars looked and sounded when speaking.

Ease of Use (20 percent): Ease of use is key to any piece of software, and often plays a significant role in buyers’ purchasing decisions. With that in mind, I evaluated how intuitive Elai’s interface is, the learning curve involved, and the availability of tips and tutorials.

Integrations (10 percent): Integrations help expand the functionality of apps and software and ensure they play nice with the existing tools users might be using. I looked at how well Elai integrates with other LMS solutions, workflow automations, and social media tools.

Pricing (10 percent): Cost matters, particularly for users on a budget. I evaluated how much bang-for-buck users get with each of Elai’s pricing plans as well as the functionality and generosity of its free tier.

Customer Support (5 percent): I looked at what kinds of customer support Elai offers (email, chat, phone, etc.), how responsive the company is, and how users fare when they run into issues.

Bottom Line: Elai Offers Quick and Easy AI Video Creation

Elai is a solid choice for anyone who needs to create professional-looking videos at scale. With its strong automation features and minimal learning curve, it’s ideal for users who need to create polished presentations and training material with minimal skills requirements. However, while the platform offers good value with its extensive toolbox, its AI avatars and text-to-speech features feel unconvincing, and the free trial’s strict limitations pushes users toward paying for a subscription too quickly.

For a detailed look at today’s generative AI video tools, read our recommendations for the best AI video generators.