- AI startup Synthesia on Thursday announced the launch of its “Expressive Avatars” — AI-generated digital avatars that can convey human emotions including happiness, sadness, and frustration.
- Synthesia, which is backed by U.S. chipmaking giant Nvidia, raised $90 million from investors last year for a valuation of around $1 billion.
- The company is also a part of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity.
Synthesia, an artificial intelligence startup supported by Nvidia, debuted a new generation of AI-generated digital avatars on Thursday that can interpret text input from users to represent human emotions.
About Synthesis
Founded in 2017, Synthesia is one of the more recent AI “unicorn” companies in Britain. It raised $90 million from investors last year at a valuation of approximately $1 billion. Additional investors include Accel, Kleiner Perkins, GV, FirstMark Capital, and MMC.
Synthesis mandates that all prospective customers go through a comprehensive “Know Your Customer” procedure akin to what the banking sector uses, which helps deter dishonest people from fabricating company profiles to disseminate false information.
According to Synthesia, the company is already getting ready for the next round of international elections and has put in place a number of safeguards to make sure that hostile actors abusing its platform to rig different polls won’t be successful.
Synthesia is also a member of the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, a group of AI businesses that work to certify content and digitally “watermark” content produced by AI so that users are aware that it was created by AI rather than humans.
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AI-generated digital avatar
According to the company, its “Expressive Avatars” can conflate virtual and real-world characters. It seeks to remove expenses associated with the professional video production process, such as cameras, microphones, actors, and protracted edits. Actors recite scripts in front of a green screen at Synthesia’s London studio to train the system.
Synthesia demonstrated how to incorporate three lines of text into its platform in one demonstration: “I am happy. I’m depressed. “I’m frustrated,” the viewer was told, and the AI-generated actor in the video answered by voicing each matching emotion.
According to Synthesia, the company’s technology is used by more than 55,000 companies—including half of the Fortune 100—to create digital avatars for training videos and corporate presentations.
