As fellow bloggers, we know how important it is to cut through the marketing hype to find tools that are useful for our workflow and lifestyle. In each review, I’ll put emerging AI technologies through thorough, hands-on testing to determine if they can be effectively utilized by bloggers like you and me, or if the functionality is more of a general fit rather than for our specific needs.
By doing the legwork and sharing both testing results and transparent recommendations, my goal is to save you both time and money by providing real-world insights from a content creator who understands the challenges of our craft. Whether a product is worth celebrating as a true time saver or avoids becoming just another Shiny New Object distraction, you’ll find the honest truth here to help you separate hype from what can truly help improve your blogging experience.
My transparency will be upfront. If a product has an affiliate link, you’ll be the first to know. But don’t worry – my recommendations are never for sale. Some reviews may cost me money! I’m here for you, not necessarily commissions.
What is Synthesia Studio?
Synthesia (https://www.synthesia.io/) is an AI Video Creation Platform that allows users to easily create high-quality videos from plain text in just a few minutes. It is tailored for businesses seeking a simple and cost-effective solution to create compelling video content, such as
- marketing videos
- product demonstrations
- corporate presentations
- engaging Facebook ads
With over 85 video avatars, support for 120+ languages, 55+ templates, and the ability to create custom avatars, Synthesia offers a wide range of features to help users create professional-looking videos without the need for actors, equipment, or studios.
What is Synthesia Studion Used For? 
There is a lot of interest and excitement around AI video generators like Synthesia because of their potential capabilities:
- Creativity and customization – They allow for highly customized and creative video content generation without requiring animation or video production skills. Users can generate videos from text prompts, adjust styles, characters, scenes, etc.
- On-demand personalization – People may want personalized videos for things like social media, marketing, remote communication, e-learning, etc. AI generators make it possible to automatically customize videos quickly on demand.
- Lower production costs – Traditional video production can be expensive and time-consuming. AI generators vastly reduce the costs and resources needed to make videos at scale. This opens up new opportunities.
- Scalability – Once trained, AI systems can generate high-quality video content at massive scales far beyond human capacity. This enables always-on, personalized videos at a global level.
- Novelty effect – Generating lifelike videos from text alone through AI is a very new and futuristic capability that fascinates many. It sparks people’s interest in emerging technologies.
- Demo effect – Early AI video generators are still crude but their demos showcase great potential. This drumming up broader interest until the capabilities improve further.
Pricing
The Free Personal/Hobbyist plan has been eliminated.
Synthesia now offers a Personal plan priced at $30 per month ($300/year), which includes one user, and 10 video credits per month. You can think of 1 credit as one minute of video. With these 10 credits, you can create one video 10 minutes long, ten videos 1 minute long, or if you are thinking like me, you can create 40 videos 15 seconds long. I see a YouTube short opportunity here, thinking smaller, it very well could be 60 video clips 10 seconds long for Instagram.
Depending on your product or approach, there are 10 background scenes for you to choose from, and 90+ AI Avatars for all of your diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns. Wealthy Affiliate is a worldwide organization. We have every country in the world represented within our 2 million-member community. With that many people around the globe, it is an added benefit to have 120+ languages and voices to choose from.
I am reminded of the old joke if you speak 4 languages, you are called Quadrilingual, if you speak 3 languages, you are trilingual, if you speak 2 languages, you are bilingual. If you speak only one language, you are American! Having lived abroad for nearly 8 years, I can truly relate to that image.
But I digress… With 120+ languages available, my Canadian neighbors to the north can use their credits to create both English and French clips WITHOUT having to rewrite their script. For the multinationals that are out there, feel free to divide up the credits/minutes into as many languages as you may need.
Synthesia for Bloggers
AI video generators provide bloggers with powerful new tools to enhance and expand their content in visual formats. With these systems, bloggers can automatically generate a variety of video types without requiring any video production expertise. They can create explainers, tutorials, interviews, and demonstration videos to make their written topics and reviews clearer and more impactful for audiences. AI also allows bloggers to produce personalized promotional, branding recap videos at scale to market themselves and engage followers across platforms. Marketers benefit from the ability to quickly customize and update video content for products. Additionally, videos generated from blogs bolster SEO and discoverability when paired with written posts. Overall, AI unlocks vast opportunities for multimedia content creation that was previously costly, complex, and time-intensive. It gives bloggers new ways to deepen engagement, reach wider audiences, and grow their brands through highly customized on-demand videos.
Worth it?
My attraction to Synthesia was the Text to Video Application. For those of us who do not have a radio voice to do our sound bites, this is ideal. We have all had great success with various Text to Picture Designers. What used to take 3-4 minutes to generate a picture, now takes seconds. The thought to get videos to that level is a definite work in progress.
For those that are wondering about what you are getting yourself into, we are only allowed to create a short 30-second demo. That demo provides a choice of five avatars, and no options to change the avatars’ voices. The video contains the Synthesia watermark and it is only available via a sharable link.
My first foray into this demo was to create an infomercial for my fictitious use of AI Dreamscape Creator. You can find the video here.
Dreamscape by Synthesia
This is the base background, that comes with their “Sales Pitch” avatar. You can see that they are keeping this very guarded. Once I generated this 30-second soundbite, I had to give them my email so that they could “send me” the shareable link once the video was created. Sharable links, with no way to embed your sample avatar into your web page. It took them about 15 minutes to get this turned around. The link to the video is above.
My “account rep” sent me an email the following asking if he could answer any questions that I may have. I replied that I am an affiliate marketer looking to review the Studio. Crickets….
So I attempted to create a second 30-second clip. Went through the same procedures, this time with a different message. I submitted my email address, the same email as the first. It has now been two and a half hours since it was submitted. Nothing. UPDATE: The rep is on vacation until 8/21/2023.
I really would have preferred to have more opportunities to play around with this interesting software. I had no idea what I wanted to create in the demo. So this was the first thing that come to mind.
Overall, I believe that Synthesia Studio could be a super tool for creating shorts for bloggers. They very well could be primed for super things. If I had a strong desire to wade into the shorts pool. without putting myself into the picture, I would go this route.
But because of the perceived limitations and inability to get much accomplished while using the demo, this is going to be a 6 out of 10 today, but I will keep this item on my radar as I ramp up my Instagram and Twitter traffic.
