Creating my custom AI avatar in Synthesia

Synthesia is a video creation platform that uses AI to create high-quality videos with lifelike human avatars, even without prior experience in video production. This is what I used to create my interview with my AI clone.

Synthesia is extremely easy to use and I don't plan on describing the steps on how to create your personal AI avatar. There are some nuances and challenges and no doubt you'll eventually have to engage support a few times.

Though you can use one of Synthesia's 160+ readily available AI models, I was not interested in that. I wanted an AI avatar that looked like me and sounded like me. It first starts with creating your Personal Avatar (the Studio Avatar is more fit for studio level productions).

Simply click on the Create Avatar button and follow the steps.

Creating a personal AI avatar is harder than it looks, particularly if you want it to look good. Read more details on some of my challenges here.

After recording, it takes up to 24 hours for your personal to be ready for use.

This is my little makeshift setup.

Once the avatar is created, simply create a video(s) from the main menu. You can select from a number of voices, but I chose my own voice. Type your script and break it down into scenes if you want to. There is a 1 second gap between scenes though.

As you can see from the following screenshot, this is a scripted platform. Add your script, "generate" the video, and your avatar reads our what your wrote.

I utilized the diction feature to try fix the pronunciation of certain words such as "Ahmed". The AI voiceover butchered the word "Ansible" so I tried to add the phonetic spelling to the diction feature, but that was a disaster.

I ended up experimenting with a few variations, and "ann sibull" seemed to work the best.

There's really not much more to say about the AI avatar video creation process using Synthesia. Though impressive, it's not perfect. I cannot compare it with other competitors on the market having not tried any other. I would not recommend it for production use though (as of the date of this blog post).

But Synthesia, as well as their competitors, are aggressively marching along, improving all aspects of the video creation process and continue introducing new features. I suspect massive improvements in as little as 2 years.