Roleplay & Dubbing

Roleplay & Dubbing adds two capabilities to AI avatar videos. Roleplay lets an avatar go beyond reading a fixed script, instead acting out a scene in a back-and-forth exchange suited to the situation and role. Dubbing takes the speech in an already-filmed video and swaps it for a voice track in another language.

A theater comparison makes this easier to grasp. Roleplay is like an actor who, given only a script outline, imagines how a scene partner would respond and performs accordingly. Dubbing is like staging that same play in a foreign theater by fitting different-language voice actors to the original lines. Both let a video be used in more ways without reshooting anything.

This feature was one of seven new capabilities Synthesia rolled out over the course of July, and it's useful for videos that rehearse real conversational situations—like internal training or customer service—or for videos that need to deliver the same content to employees in different countries, each in their own language.

The article mentions this feature in the line: "On August 17, Synthesia also released a recap video summarizing the seven new features it had rolled out over July, introducing the Roleplay & Dubbing feature among them." A common point of confusion is that the 'single-photo avatar' feature covered in the same article is not the same recent news—Roleplay & Dubbing was a separate update released earlier, in July.