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Verdict:
Synthesia lets non-technical users quickly create and edit professional videos with AI avatars that look and sound lifelike, but lack the personality you’d find in human actors.
Pricing:
- Free: 36 minutes of video per year
- Paid: From $18 to $59 per month; custom Enterprise quotes
Key Features:
- Automatic script writing
- Intuitive video editor with extensive customization options
- Supports more than 140 languages
- Voice cloning and avatar building
- Hundreds of pre-designed video templates, voiceovers, and avatars
- Video analytics
- Live collaboration tools
- Video sharing and embed
Synthesia is an AI video generator that helps you quickly create written video scripts and professional videos containing conversational AI avatars that look like real people. With an abundance of video templates, AI voices, avatars, languages, and customization options, the tool makes it easy to quickly edit videos to your specifications for training, customer support, educational, sales enablement, or marketing purposes. Compared to similar AI video tools, Synthesia offers a large number of editing options, including the ability to edit and create your own avatar, change the background, and alter the music and accent of the voiceover. The only real downside is that Synthesia’s AI avatars can seem cold and detached. There are also video minute limitations on each plan, forcing you to buy extra minutes as an add-on.
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Synthesia Review: What You Need to Know
Who It’s For: Synthesia is best for business teams looking to quickly create professional videos featuring talking avatars at scale.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy-to-use video editor with extensive customization options | Avatar builder and voice cloning are restricted on the free plan |
| Lets you embed videos in authoring tool, CMS, CRM, LMS, and other systems | Limited video minute creation outside the Enterprise plan |
| Free plan with no card information required | The avatars can seem bland, corporate, and devoid of emotion |
Continue reading to learn about Synthesia’s use cases, pricing, core features, ease of use, customer support, and alternatives.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Who Should Use Synthesia?
Businesses looking to increase their video production efficiency using artificial intelligence should consider using Synthesia. The AI video generator lets you create, edit, and publish professional videos in minutes—without film crews, recording devices, cameras, or editing experience. This saves you time and money and turns your team into efficient video creators.
Users who will find the most value from the platform will be those creating sales enablement videos, employee training sessions, promotional videos, customer support tutorials, or educational videos. Supporting more than 140 languages and offering automatic closed captioning, Synthesia is also great if you need to create videos for a global audience or employee base. Enterprise users also gain access to one-click translations, which lets you translate a video into multiple languages in minutes.
Who Shouldn’t Use Synthesia?
Synthesia may not be the right choice if you have a low video budget but want to generate a large number of videos each year. At $18 per month, the Starter plan is affordable but limits you to 120 minutes of video production per year. The Creator plan, at $59 per month, offers just 360 minutes per year. Those who want to produce more videos will have to buy more minutes as an add-on, which can quickly become expensive.
You should also avoid Synthesia if you want personality or passion in your video’s actors and presenters. Though composed, and semi-realistic, these avatars often come off as clinical and somewhat lifeless—think of flight attendants pushing through the flight safety presentation they’ve given thousands of times. Their faces might smile, but they lack authenticity and I never once felt like smiling back.
While it’s great for passing information along in a video format, you wouldn’t want to use this tool for videos meant to forge a deep connection with your audience or employees. The Avatar influencer or AI online teacher is far from a reality. You’ll have to use humans for that.
Pricing
Synthesia offers one free and three paid plans. The pricing is high for the market, since you’re limited to a certain number of video minutes per year on each and have to pay to add more. HeyGen, on the other hand, offers unlimited videos in all its packages. However, Synthesia is often worth the price if you consider how much you’re saving on film production costs and industry-leading customization features.
- Free: 36 minutes of video per year
- Starter: $18 per month/180 minutes of video per year
- Creator: $59 per month/360 minutes of video per year
- Enterprise: Custom
7 Key Features of Synthesia
Synthesia offers a robust feature set including an AI video and script generator, an intuitive video editor, and hundreds of pre-made templates, avatars, and voiceovers. It also offers some of the best multilingual support in the product category and extensive team collaboration tools.
AI Script and Video Generator
The AI video generator asks you a few questions—what your video is about and its target audience—and then writes a script and creates a corresponding video equipped with a speaking avatar that feels lifelike. If you already have a script, you can upload it in a PDF, Word, or Text file.
As a former sales rep, I decided to test out this feature by asking it to create a sales training video that teaches sales reps the basics of objection handling. Since I know the material, I felt I could adequately assess the text generator’s performance. Overall, I was impressed with the script’s content, which was accurate, well-organized, and contained some of the most important strategies and principles of objection handling.
I wouldn’t, however, let the script go to my sales team without editing the content to add some personality and examples while also making it more relevant to my sales team and the common objections and types of prospects they’ll face on the job.
The 13-scene, two-minute video it produced did what it needed to do—the avatars looked like real people and the voiceover matched their mouth movements better than some dubbed foreign-language films I’ve seen. I especially liked how the examples showed two avatars in split screen acting out an actual sales objection conversation, which made it more engaging than simply having a single avatar tell the story.
Video Customization
After you’ve generated the script and video, Synthesia lets you edit the video’s avatar, color, fonts, text, and layout. You can also choose from different background spaces like coffee shops or data centers to match the purpose of your video and add transitions, music, and other forms of media.
The editor interface is user-friendly and self-explanatory. When using the tool, it felt sort of like building a slideshow—except instead of slides, they’re scenes. Overall, it has some of the best customization options out there, especially with its avatar customization, which competing video generators like HeyGen lack.
AI Video Templates
Synthesia offers more than 250 pre-made AI video examples that you can use as the foundation of your AI-generated video. This is one of the largest video template sets in the market. Template categories range from use cases like sales and onboarding videos to specific themes, like “minimalistic” or “corporate.” This feature enables you to create a professional-looking video without spending much time on editing the design.
AI Voiceover and Translation
Synthesia offers a variety of pre-recorded voices in different languages and accents that will read your script and sound like a human. Currently, Synthesia offers more than 140 languages, making it a great choice for businesses with a global audience. You can also automatically generate closed captions on your videos, and if you have the Starter Plan or above, you can clone your own voice.
AI Avatars
Synthesia lets users choose from more than 230 AI avatars across different ethnicities and genders. In testing the avatars, I found that they looked and spoke like real people but lacked personality and came off as corporate and stiff. That might not be much of a problem for most business use cases, but if you’re a content creator it could be detrimental to your ability to connect with your audience.
If you use the Starter plan or above, you can also build your own custom avatars—your AI twin—by shooting a video of yourself speaking and uploading it to Synthesia. The shooting process takes about nine minutes, but you won’t receive the avatar until the next day. This is a great feature for professionals who want to appear in their videos without having to actually act in them.
It’s worth noting that the pre-designed avatars are restricted from making political statements or giving medical advice, or saying anything controversial to protect the person whose face was used to generate the avatar. The solution is to create your own avatar.
Team Collaboration
Synthesia’s collaboration features make it easy for team members to edit and polish the video together, in real-time or asynchronously. This way, your subject matter expert can bring the script to life while the aspiring cinematographer on your team redesigns the background.
You can prototype the video and share it with your team, make comments and edits in one central workspace, and update the videos with a click of the button. You can also see what other team members are working on, thanks to the named cursors, and access version history to track changes and progress.
Video Analytics
Synthesia offers a video analytics feature that enables you to track such video metrics as total views, impressions, average watch time, completion rate, rewatch rate, and more. This helps you assess each video’s performance, spot areas where users are most and least engaged, and make data-driven improvements to the video’s content, format, and text.
Synthesia Ease of Use
With a text-to-video AI generator and a user-friendly video editor, Synthesia makes it simple for anyone to create high-quality, custom videos regardless of experience. Its wide range of pre-made video templates also offer you a solid starting point if you’re unsure of how to structure and design a video. And if you run into challenges with the platform, customer support is available on chat and email to assist you. Overall, when creating my video, I found it incredibly easy to use.
Synthesia Customer Service
Synthesia’s customer support team answers customer queries over email and live chat daily from 9 am to 11 pm (GMT). Enterprise accounts receive a Customer Success Manager who guides them through a custom onboarding process and provides ongoing personalized support. Across popular review sites, most users state that the customer support staff is responsive, friendly, and competent.
Synthesia Alternatives
New generative AI video tools seem to be popping up each week. Two alternatives worth checking out if Synthesia is not a good match, Elai and HeyGen, are affordable and fully capable.
Elai.io
Elai.io is an AI-powered video creation and editing platform that is slightly more affordable than Synthesia, with video minutes averaging around $2; Synthesia’s fall closer to $3. Though Elai lacks the large number of avatars, supported languages, and customization options offered by Synthesia, it’s still a robust, user-friendly tool. Plus, it offers some features that Synthesia does not, including cartoon mascots and multilingual voice cloning. It costs about $200 annually.
HeyGen
HeyGen is an AI video generation platform that will appeal to those looking for unlimited video minutes on all paid plans. While that’s a great perk, keep in mind that its starter plan only allows for the creation of videos up to five minutes long. As for features, HeyGen is not as customization-friendly as Synthesia, but it does offer three times as many background music choices, and its support team is available 24/7 instead of 9 am to 11 pm (GMT).
FAQs
What are the Cons of Synthesia?
Synthesia has caps on how many video minutes you can produce without paying extra, and its AI avatars and voiceovers sometimes come off as overly corporate and emotionless.
Is Synthesia Free or Paid?
Synthesia offers a free plan that allows you to create 36 minutes of video per year. To gain advanced features and more minutes, you have to upgrade.
How Long Does Synthesia Take to Create a Video?
Synthesia takes just a few minutes to generate a customizable video draft and script, but it takes longer—from 10 to 30 minutes, depending on complexity and length—to produce the final, publishable copy of the video.
Bottom Line: Synthesia Generates AI Videos Quickly
AI generators like Synthesia leverage artificial intelligence to enable users to turn their written video idea into a quality video in minutes, which they can then edit using various customization options such as custom avatars, voiceover accents, background images, music, and more. Overall, Synthesia is a great option for any business looking to start producing video content at a faster rate for educational, marketing, internal communications, and employee training.
Read our guide to AI video generators to learn about all the top AI video creation tools.