Synthesia launches Sessions, an interactive avatar platform for roleplay and surveys

Synthesia announced Sessions on 1 October 2026, a platform for two-way conversations with its avatars rather than one-way generated video. The company frames it around situations where demand exceeds available human capacity — coaching, interviewing and guidance.

Sessions launches with two formats. Roleplay Sessions let people practise conversations with a responsive avatar that gives real-time coaching and a score, with custom scenarios for sales, management, compliance and retail. Survey Sessions have an avatar conduct one-on-one interviews, following up on answers and reporting sentiment across respondents. A third format, Expert Sessions — step-by-step onboarding, tool walkthroughs and troubleshooting — is listed as coming soon. Roleplay and Survey Sessions are available from 1 October with a free trial that does not require a credit card.

Synthesia cites early data that 78% of learners returned to attempt a roleplay more than once and that, of those, 83% improved their score on a later attempt. Named customers in the announcement include Hays, whose UK and Ireland chief executive Tom Way said the platform helps "explore new ways of delivering practical, engaging learning experiences"; Xponential Fitness, whose learning and development director Emilie Porter-Rand said it would enable "consistent, high-quality practice at scale"; and LQRA, whose global head Pete Brooks called it a step towards bringing "AI and human intelligence closer together". The platform is listed as SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, 27701 and 42001 certified, GDPR compliant and SSO-enabled.

Why it matters for digital humans: This is the clearest signal yet that the enterprise avatar market is moving from generated video to interactive sessions, which changes the cost and the engineering shape of a deployment: latency, turn-taking and scoring logic all become live concerns rather than render-time ones. The two engagement figures are vendor-reported and unaudited, and they measure repeat attempts and score improvement inside the product rather than any downstream job performance — useful as adoption signals, not as evidence of training effectiveness. The compliance certifications matter more than they look: they are usually what decides whether a regulated buyer can run interactive avatars against real employee data at all.