Synthesia Launches Sessions Platform for Interactive AI Avatars

Synthesia on October 1, 2026, launched Sessions, a platform for two-way conversations with lifelike AI avatars, with Roleplay and Survey Sessions available the same day and a third session type, Expert Sessions, announced as coming soon. Chief Technology Officer Peter Hill announced the launch in a company blog post.

A Ready-Made Platform Beside the Interactive Avatar API

Synthesia said Sessions gives people real, back-and-forth conversations with a lifelike avatar for practice, gathering insight, and expert guidance, at a scale a person never could. Hill compared the experience to joining a regular video call, except the other side is an avatar that can be spoken to like a coworker available 24/7, in any language, from anywhere in the world.

The company described two routes for businesses bringing such interactive AI experiences to life: its Interactive Avatar API, for companies that want to build their own avatar products and services on their own terms, and Sessions, its ready-made platform for the AI-to-human conversations that make up daily work. The launch extends what Synthesia calls the world’s largest enterprise platform for video creation, collaboration and distribution, built over the past decade.

Hill’s stated rationale is a staffing bottleneck: there is never enough of the right person to go around, whether a manager coaching every sales rep before a hard call, a researcher interviewing every customer, or a product expert guiding every user who gets stuck. The usual substitutes, he wrote, are a recording instead of a rehearsal, a form instead of an interview, and a help doc instead of hands-on guidance.

Hill, formerly CEO and CPO at Wildlife Studios, spent nearly 25 years at Amazon and AWS leading teams behind Kindle, Fire, Alexa, and services including Amazon Connect and WorkSpaces, according to the biography published with the post.

Roleplay Sessions Gains Personalization and Custom Roleplays

Roleplay Sessions is live with the launch. Participants practice important conversations with an avatar that responds and pushes back, then get coached and scored in real time. Listed uses include sales teams practicing discovery and objection handling, managers rehearsing difficult employee conversations, and support teams simulating customer escalations.

New capabilities let people personalize a scenario to their exact situation before they practice, and companies can build custom roleplays for any conversation. Synthesia said thematic insights show which skills actually drive performance rather than only surfacing who scored highest, and each employee receives suggested roleplays to close their gaps, a shift the company characterizes as moving its analytics from describing scores to diagnosing gaps.

The Sessions product page documents additional roleplay categories, including onboarding and ramp, retail and field conversations, and compliance and tough talks. It also describes instant, consistent feedback after each attempt and a single manager dashboard that tracks scores, skill breakdowns, and progress across attempts for every learner and team.

Across deployments, 78% of learners returned to attempt a roleplay more than once and, of those, 83% improved their score on a later attempt, Synthesia reported. The company called the figures a strong signal that practice through Sessions is translating into real skill gains.

Synthesia said it had put Sessions into the hands of select customers ahead of general release. Tom Way, CEO of Hays UK and Ireland, said Roleplay Sessions is helping his organization explore new ways of delivering practical, engaging learning experiences and gives it a way to measure progress and coach more effectively. Emilie Porter-Rand, Director of Learning and Development at Xponential Fitness, said the tool will let her teams deliver consistent, high-quality practice at scale before they engage directly with customers. Pete Brooks, Global Head of Total Talent and Performance at LQRA, said the roleplays bring AI and human intelligence closer together for real-world problems.

Survey Sessions and Expert Sessions

Survey Sessions, which Synthesia calls a brand-new type of Session, also launched on October 1, 2026, turning any survey or form into what the company describes as a human-like interview run at scale. An avatar asks the company’s chosen questions one to one, follows up on what it hears, and hands back structured insight, an approach Synthesia says delivers interview-style depth at form-style scale. Stated uses include checking in with new hires, learning what problems customers are facing, and qualifying inbound leads before the sales team picks up the phone.

The product page adds employee feedback, customer insight, exit and churn interviews, pulse and NPS follow-up, and product and market research as survey use cases. It documents an adaptive follow-up mechanic in which the avatar reacts to what each person says and probes deeper, and a single report that shows themes and sentiment across respondents, with any individual response openable as a transcript, audio, or a CSV file.

Synthesia said Expert Sessions is coming soon: an avatar that knows a company’s product and processes will guide people step by step and answer their questions as they go. Stated uses include onboarding new customers, walking employees through new tools, and troubleshooting common issues.

Availability and Enterprise Terms

Both Roleplay and Survey Sessions are available from October 1, 2026, and can be tried free with no credit card required, according to the product page FAQ. The FAQ states that Sessions run on the Synthesia platform with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001 certifications, plus GDPR compliance and SSO, and that a customer’s security team reviews the platform once rather than once per session type.

Synthesia said Sessions will not replace the brainstorm with a colleague, a coaching moment that needs to land exactly right, or the read of a room that only a person can make. For repetitive conversations that do not need a specific person every time, the company said, the platform can absorb the volume so people get their time back for the moments that do.