Synthesia launches Sessions: AI avatars you can talk back to — Roleplay and Survey live today
Synthesia launched Sessions on October 1, 2026: a ready-made platform for real, two-way conversations with lifelike AI avatars — for sales roleplay, interviews, surveys, and soon expert guidance. Roleplay and Survey Sessions are available from today; CTO Peter Hill announced the launch in a company blog post.
Synthesia announced on Thursday the launch of Sessions, a ready-made platform for real, back-and-forth conversations with lifelike AI avatars. Two session types — Roleplay and Survey — are available from today, and a third, Expert Sessions, is coming soon. The announcement came in a company blog post from CTO Peter Hill.
The pitch is blunt: there is never enough of the right person to go around. A manager can't coach every sales rep before a hard call. A researcher can't interview every customer. A product expert can't guide every user who gets stuck. Sessions is built to absorb the repetitive conversations that don't need a specific human every time — a recording becomes a rehearsal, a form becomes an interview, a help doc becomes hands-on guidance.
Two routes to interactive avatars#
Sessions sits beside Synthesia's Interactive Avatar API, the developer route for companies that want to build their own avatar products on their own terms. Sessions is the ready-made alternative: two-way conversations with an avatar for the practice, insight-gathering, and expert guidance that make up daily work. Hill described it as joining a regular video call — except the other side is an avatar that can be spoken to like a coworker available around the clock, in any language, from anywhere.
The launch extends what Synthesia calls the world's largest enterprise platform for video creation, collaboration, and distribution — the product line the company has built over the past decade.
Roleplay Sessions#
Roleplay Sessions is live from today. Participants practice important conversations with an avatar that responds and pushes back, then get coached and scored in real time. The listed uses: sales teams practicing discovery and objection handling, managers rehearsing difficult employee conversations, and support teams simulating customer escalations. Additional categories include onboarding and ramp, retail and field conversations, and compliance and tough talks.
Two capabilities are new with the launch. People can personalize a scenario to their exact situation before they practice, and companies can build custom roleplays for any conversation. The analytics have also shifted: thematic insights now show which skills actually drive performance, rather than only surfacing who scored highest, and each employee gets suggested roleplays to close their gaps. A manager dashboard tracks scores, skill breakdowns, and progress across attempts for every learner and team.
The company reported early numbers from its deployments: 78% of learners returned to attempt a roleplay more than once, and of those, 83% improved their score on a later attempt — a signal, Synthesia says, that practice through Sessions translates into real skill gains.
Early customers are already weighing in. 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#
Survey Sessions is the brand-new session type, also launching today. It turns any survey or form into what Synthesia 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 — interview-style depth at form-style scale. Listed 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 adds employee feedback, customer insight, exit and churn interviews, pulse and NPS follow-up, and product and market research as survey use cases. The avatar reacts to what each person says and probes deeper, and a single report shows themes and sentiment across respondents — with any individual response openable as a transcript, audio, or a CSV file.
Expert Sessions, coming soon#
Expert Sessions is the third type, announced as coming soon. The concept: an avatar that knows a company's product and processes will guide people step by step and answer their questions as they go — for 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. Sessions run on the Synthesia platform with SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27701, and 42001 certifications, plus GDPR compliance and SSO — and a customer's security team reviews the platform once rather than once per session type.
Synthesia is careful about the boundary. 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. The target is everything else: the repetitive conversations that don't need a specific person every time, absorbed at volume so people get their time back for the moments that do.