TechCrunch journalist builds first external Synthesia avatar — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Synthesia built an interactive digital avatar of TechCrunch journalist "Dom" that is deterministic and trained only on her article about venture-backed startups committing more fraud than non-VC-backed ones, deflecting every off-topic question back to that story.
- Synthesia, originally based in the U.K. and now operating a new New York office, is valued at $4 billion, crossed $100 million in ARR last year, and competes in the digital avatar market alongside D-ID, HeyGen, and Colossyan.
- Synthesia's avatar tech stack combines voice-to-text, agentic language, text-to-voice, and video models, and the company allows customers to swap in alternatives from Cartesia, ElevenLabs, Google, or OpenAI and to host avatars on any cloud.
- Synthesia recently launched "Roleplay Sessions," a product that lets employees practice scenarios like sales pitches with an interactive AI avatar that responds to and scores their performance.
- The journalist's avatars were produced in a mini film studio inside Synthesia's office using a two-minute voice recording and numerous photos, yielding two personal avatars and two interactive avatars — each in versions with and without glasses.
- Friends described the interactive avatar as "creepy" yet "close enough," while the journalist's mother called it "amazing" and joked, "I don't remember giving birth to two of you," after the model refused to answer personal questions.
- Synthesia operates three product lines: a video-creation platform with scripted classic avatars, an agentic "Sessions" platform for surveys and roleplay, and an API platform that combines its video and voice models with third-party services.
Why it matters: This is the first non-employee avatar Synthesia has built, and the journalist's parents repeatedly tried — and failed — to break its deterministic guardrails with personal questions. The avatar's ability to consistently redirect to its trained topic is exactly what enterprise PR and training customers want, and exactly what the journalist's friends called "creepy."
Ask SkimNews
