Synthesia pushes beyond videos with AI roleplay coaching

Synthesia is expanding past AI-generated training videos with a new product aimed at a tougher problem: proving employees actually learned something.

The British startup said Wednesday that it is launching Roleplay Sessions, an interactive training tool where employees can rehearse high-stakes conversations — including sales pitches, performance reviews, and customer complaints — with an AI avatar that responds, challenges them, and scores their performance against a rubric.

The launch is the first step in a broader “Sessions” platform that Synthesia plans to extend to other formats, including job interviews and candidate screening, according to TechCrunch.

CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli said the company is responding to a shift in how enterprises judge AI purchases. Rather than focusing only on polished content generation, companies increasingly want evidence that the technology changes behavior and improves results.

“Video performs way better than text or sending out a document. But for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing something rather than just reading it.”

Synthesia cited a meta-analysis of learning research to argue that most corporate training stops at informing or demonstrating, without giving workers the practice and feedback needed to build real skills.

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That also gives the company a stronger position strategically. While Synthesia’s avatar and voice systems are proprietary, the reasoning layer underneath Roleplay comes from OpenAI. By adding rubrics, performance data, and analytics, the company is trying to become more of a performance-management platform than a pure avatar vendor.

Riparbelli said managers are particularly interested in using the product to map employee capabilities at scale. One example: having an entire sales team run through the same AI roleplay exercises to generate detailed performance data.

According to a company spokesperson, early customers with scaled commercial rollouts include one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100, and one of the biggest recruitment companies in the world. The most common early uses are sales training and leadership coaching, especially around soft skills.

For now, Roleplay is an enterprise product. But Synthesia plans to expand it to small businesses, prosumers, and potentially educational institutions in the next few months, as inference costs continue to fall.