Synthesia Review: The Fastest Way to Make Training Videos (By a Long Shot)

Most companies produce training videos the hard way: hire a videographer, find a presenter, book a studio, record multiple takes, edit for hours, and ship something that's already slightly out of date by the time anyone watches it. Synthesia is built to make that entire process feel unnecessarily complicated.

What It Is

Synthesia is an AI video platform specifically designed for business training and internal communication content. You write a script, choose an AI avatar (or create one from your own recording), choose a template, and generate a finished video. No camera, no studio, no talent scheduling.

My Test: 12 Videos in One Day

I spent a full day testing Synthesia on a realistic task: creating an onboarding video series for a hypothetical software product. I made 12 videos covering product overview, feature walkthroughs, FAQ responses, and a compliance training segment. Here's my honest breakdown.

The first video took about 45 minutes including figuring out the interface. By the fifth, I was finishing in under 15 minutes. By the twelfth, under 10. The platform has a real learning curve in the first hour and then plateaus into something genuinely fast.

Avatar Quality

Synthesia has over 230 avatars. The quality varies — some are more convincing than others, and the gap between their best avatars and their average ones is noticeable. For corporate training where the audience isn't expecting cinema quality, the realistic ones hold up well on laptop and tablet screens.

Honest Limitations

The videos are clearly AI-generated to anyone paying attention. The avatar gestures are somewhat limited and repetitive across long scripts. If you need to build a sense of personal connection with an audience — think CEO messages or personal coaching — this will feel hollow. For process training, compliance content, and product walkthroughs? That constraint barely matters.

Screen recording integration is also something I wish was smoother. For software walkthroughs, switching between avatar segments and screen recordings involves more manual work than it should.

Pricing Context

Synthesia is enterprise-adjacent in pricing — it's not cheap. But the comparison isn't against free tools. The comparison is against video production costs, studio time, and the time your subject matter experts spend in front of a camera. On that comparison, for teams producing regular training content, the economics often make sense.

Who This Is For

L&D teams, HR departments, SaaS companies producing user onboarding, compliance teams, and anyone who needs to produce training or explainer content at volume without a production team. If that's you, Synthesia is almost certainly worth a trial.