Synthesia, a British company supported by the giant Nvidia, has just introduced “Expressive Avatars”. This advancement allows artificial intelligence (AI)-based avatars to simulate human emotions and gestures with impressive accuracy. The new feature was revealed on April 25, promising to transform the way corporate presentations, marketing and training are carried out.
Generative AI technology was already known for its ability to create realistic images and movements. The most notorious example of this is OpenAI's Sora video generator. However, these technologies faced challenges such as hand and limb distortions and poor lip sync. Synthesia addressed these problems by capturing movements and expressions of real humans, who read scripts in its studio, to train its avatars more effectively.
Victor Ribarbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia, highlighted in a statement the importance of this advance: “avatars do not understand what they are saying”, a limitation that its latest technology aims to overcome, allowing for a more authentic facial response to emotions.
💥This is it. This changes everything. 💥
For the first time in history, #AIavatars are able to understand what they're saying.
Powered by our new AI avatar model, EXPRESS-1, they can detect sentiment of a script and perform all the subtle nuances of human communication.
Tea… pic.twitter.com/uj3WIjcGlm
— Synthesia 🎥 (@synthesiaIO) April 25, 2024
Innovation is not just restricted to visual and emotional enhancement. Avatars now support over 130 languages, offer automatic captions, and can even replicate users' voices. Although all language models have shown advances, the English model stands out for its proximity to human expressions, according to tests carried out.
Synthesia, which has only been on the market for six years, is already trusted by half of the Fortune 100 and serves more than 55.000 companies around the world, including names like Zoom, Xerox, Microsoft and Reuters. With the growing demand for AI solutions, the startup saw its valuation approach $1 billion, an impressive milestone for the company and a testament to its impact on the industry.
