Synthesia launched an option to make AI-generated avatars by recording footage of yourself with a webcam or your phone.
Synthesia
Synthesia, a British artificial intelligence startup, on Monday showed off a slew of new product updates including the ability to create your own Apple-style key presentations with AI avatars by using just a laptop webcam or your phone.
The seven-year-old firm, which is backed by Nvidia, said the new product updates will make it more of an all-encompassing video production suite for large companies, rather than just a platform that offers users the ability to create AI-generated avatars.
Among the new updates Synthesia is launching is the ability to produce AI avatars using webcams or a phone, “full body” avatars with hands and arms, and a screen recording tool that shows an AI avatar guiding you through what you’re watching.
What is Synthesia?
Synthesia, which says it’s used by nearly half of the Fortfune 500, uses AI avatars for all kinds of purposes.
These can range from creating tailored training videos to guide employees around certain processes, or generating promotional material that can be shown in the form of a video rather than an email or other textual communications.
But that hasn’t always been the case. According to co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli, in the first three years of the company’s story, Synthesia actually started out trying to sell its technology to Hollywood agencies and big-budget video production companies. The firm used computer vision for an AI dubbing tool that made mouth movements more lifelike for different languages.
“What we figured out was that the quality threshold to do anything with these guys was so big, no matter what we do, we’ll be a very small part of a much bigger process,” Riparbelli told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
“What was more interesting was the democratization aspect of: There are millions of people in the world who want to make video, but they’re not making video today because they don’t have the budget.”
In an Apple-style keynote, Synthesia’s CEO unveiled the firm’s new products, touting them as a more productivity-focused suite of tools for use by businesses, rather than just a platform that offers AI avatars.
Apple-style keynotes with a webcam
One of the biggest new features the firm showed off was an option to make AI-generated avatars by recording less than five minutes of footage using a webcam or your phone. You can also clone your voice to have the avatars speak in multiple different languages
Typically, to make an AI avatar using Synthesia’s platform, you have to go into a studio in-person. Human actors go into a recording booth, record their voice, and perform lines in front of a green screen on an actual filming set.
This is all training data to provide Synthesia’s AI algorithm with the facial and vocal nuances it needs to come up with humanlike avatars that speak in an expressive way. Earlier this year, Synthesia debuted new expressive avatars that can convey human emotions, including happiness, sadness, and frustration.
But now, Synthesia is introducing new software which will make it easier for users to produce a digital version of themselves from anywhere, using just a webcam and Synthesia’s software.
The company is also launching the ability to create full-body avatars. This is different to Synthesia’s current avatars, which are limited to just portrait view. Now, you can go into a studio with dozens of cameras, sensors and lights all around you to make avatars that can move their hands.
Generating hands is something that’s traditionally hard for AI to do — often because hands are only a small part of the human body and not typically the focus in visual content.
Synthesia also debuted the option to play videos of AI avatars speaking in any language they like, whether it’s English, French, German, or Chinese.
In the future, Synthesia says, it will be able to tailor AI avatars for different countries: For example, a Nigerian avatar running a user through a tutorial rather than an American.
Synthesia’s AI video assistant can produce summaries of entire articles and documents.
Synthesia
Synthesia also launched a new AI video assistant which can produce summaries of entire articles and documents. This could be a human resources specialist making a quick video explaining company benefits packages, for example.
Synthesia’s screen recording tool shows an AI avatar guiding you through what you’re watching.
Synthesia
Another big feature the company is rolling out is a new screen recording tool, which shows an AI avatar guiding you through what you’re watching.
Not chasing a ‘PR moment’
In CNBC’s interview with him, Riparbelli characterized what Synthesia is trying to do as an enterprise-focused product overhaul, which would make it more akin to giants like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Zoom in the enterprise category.
“The world has been blown away by this stuff for the last 12 to 18 to 24 months, which is awesome,” Riparbelli told CNBC.
“But now we have experimented a lot, and we have found out the right use cases for these technologies that have lasting business value. They’re not like just a short-term PR moment.”
“You need to do that business goal of reducing customer support tickets by showing videos instead of text; or sell by making videos instead of just sending out emails,” he added.
“Now people are creating workflows around that. They need better ways to achieve their business goals, not just an interface with AI models. That’s where we’re going as a company.”
The company’s competitors include AI video tools Veed, Colossyan, Elai, and HeyGen. And Chinese-owned social media app TikTok also recently debuted Symphony Assistant, a product that allows creators to make their own AI avatars.
The company makes money through a number of subscription pricing plans ranging from $22 for a “starter” plan and $67 for a “creator” plan, to custom “enterprise” plans where pricing is based on negotiations with Synthesia’s sales team.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends the Saudi-U.S. Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
Hamad I Mohammed | Reuters
Tesla’s shares have finally turned positive for the year.
After a dismal first quarter, which was the worst for the stock in any period since 2022, and a brutal start to April, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping new tariffs, Wall Street has again rallied around the electric vehicle maker.
The stock rose 3.6% on Monday to $410.26, topping its closing price of 2024 by over $6. It’s up 85% since bottoming for the year at $221.86 on April 4. A new filing revealed that CEO Elon Musk purchased about $1 billion worth of shares in the company through his family foundation.
It’s the second straight year Tesla has bounced back after a down first quarter. Last year, the shares fell 29% in the first three months before ending up 63% for 2024.
In recent weeks, analysts have praised the EV maker’s proposed pay plan for Musk, which could amount to a $1 trillion windfall for the world’s richest person over the next decade. The company has also gotten a boost from its new MegaBlocks battery energy storage systems that Tesla ships preassembled to businesses looking to lower their power costs or make greater use of electricity from renewable resources.
Even with the rebound, Tesla is the second-worst performer this year among tech’s megacaps, ahead of only Apple, which is down about 5% in 2025. Tesla is still in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to an aging lineup of EVs and increased competition from lower-cost competitors in China, namely BYD.
Tesla has seen a consumer backlash, in part because of Musk’s political activities, including spending nearly $300 million to propel President Trump back to the White House and his work with the Trump administration to slash the federal workforce.
Tesla leadership has been working to shift investors’ attention to other topics such as robotaxis and humanoid robots.
However, the company has yet to deliver vehicles that are safe to use without a human onboard and ready to take control if needed. And while Musk is touting Tesla’s Optimus robots, which he says will be able to do everything from factory work to babysitting, a product is still a long way from hitting the market.
Shares of the search giant jumped more than 4% on Monday, pushing the company into territory occupied only by Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple.
The stock got a big lift in early September from an antitrust ruling by a judge, whose penalties came in lighter than shareholders feared. The U.S. Department of Justice wanted Google to be forced to divest its Chrome browser, and last year a district court ruled that the company held an illegal monopoly in search and related advertising.
But Judge Amit Mehta decided against the most severe consequences proposed by the DOJ, which sent shares soaring to a record. After the big rally, President Donald Trump congratulated the company and called it “a very good day.”
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Alphabet shares are now up more than 30% this year, compared to the 15% gain for the Nasdaq.
The $3 trillion milestone comes roughly 20 years after Google’s IPO and a little more than 10 years after the creation of Alphabet as a holding company, with Google its prime subsidiary.
CEO Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Alphabet in 2019, replacing co-founder Larry Page. Pichai’s latest challenge has been the surge of new competition due to the rise of artificial intelligence, which the company has had to manage through while also fending off an aggressive set of regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
The rise of Perplexity and OpenAI ended up helping Google land the recent favorable antitrust ruling. The company’s hopes of becoming a major AI player largely ride with Gemini, Google’s flagship suite of AI models.
The U.S. and China have reached a ‘framework’ deal for social media platform TikTok, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Monday.
“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid.
Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet Friday to discuss the terms. Trump also said in a Truth Social post Monday that a deal was reached “on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
Bessent indicated that the framework could pivot the platform to U.S.-controlled ownership.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comments came during the latest round of trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Relations have soured between the two countries in recent months from Trump’s tariffs and other trade restrictions.
At the same time, TikTok parent company ByteDance faces a Sept. 17 deadline to divest the platform’s U.S. business or face being shut down in the country.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Monday that the deadline may need to be pushed back to get the deal signed, but there won’t be ongoing extensions.
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Congress passed a law last year prohibiting app store operators like Apple and Google from distributing TikTok in the U.S. due to its “foreign adversary-controlled application” status.
But Trump postponed the shutdown in January, signing an executive order in January that gave ByteDance 75 more days to make a deal. Further extensions came by way of executive orders in April and in June.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnicksaid in July that TikTok would shutter for Americans if China doesn’t give the U.S. more autonomy over the popular short-form video app.
As for who controls the platform, Trump told Fox News in June that he had a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy the app and could reveal their identities in two weeks. The reveal never came.
He has previously said he’d be open to Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison or Tesla CEO Elon Musk buying TikTok in the U.S. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity has submitted a bid for an acquisition, as has businessman Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty internet advocacy group, CNBC reported in January.
Trump told CNBC in an interview last year that he believed the platform was a national security threat, although the White House started a TikTok account in August.