Synthesia launches Sessions, a two-way AI avatar platform

Synthesia launched Sessions on October 1, 2026, a platform for two-way conversations with its lifelike AI avatars rather than the narrated videos the company built its name on.

Two session types went live the same day. Roleplay Sessions puts an avatar on the other side of a practice conversation: it responds and pushes back, then coaches and scores the participant in real time. Synthesia lists sales discovery and objection handling, managers rehearsing a difficult employee conversation, and support teams simulating customer escalations as the uses it built for. Participants can personalise a scenario to their own situation before practising, companies can build custom roleplays, and the analytics surface which skills drive performance rather than only who scored highest. Each employee gets suggested roleplays aimed at their gaps.

Survey Sessions turns a survey or form into a one-to-one interview run at scale. An avatar asks the company's questions, follows up adaptively on what it hears, and returns structured insight including themes and sentiment across everyone surveyed, with each individual answer openable as a transcript, audio or a CSV. Synthesia lists new-hire check-ins, customer problem discovery, lead qualification, employee feedback, exit and churn interviews, pulse and NPS follow-up, and product and market research.

Expert Sessions, still to come, is described as an avatar that knows a company's product and processes and guides people through it step by step.

Both live modes can be tried free with no credit card, per the product page, and Sessions runs on infrastructure holding SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and ISO 42001 certifications, with GDPR compliance and SSO.

The company also reported adoption figures from deployments ahead of general release: 78% of learners returned to attempt a roleplay more than once, and of those, 83% improved their score on a later attempt. Those are Synthesia's own numbers from its own customers and have not been independently audited.

CTO Peter Hill announced the launch. He joined Synthesia after nearly 25 years at Amazon and AWS, where he led teams behind Kindle, Fire, Alexa and services including Amazon Connect and WorkSpaces, and was previously chief executive and chief product officer at Wildlife Studios.

Roleplay and Survey Sessions are live now; Expert Sessions is on the way.