At a Glance
| Outdoo AI | Synthesia Roleplay Sessions | |
|---|---|---|
| Launched | Purpose-built roleplay and coaching platform | July 22, 2026 (under a month old) |
| Roleplay pricing | Usage-based, tied to training activity | Paid add-on, unpublished (video plans start at $29/mo) |
| Scored against your playbook or CRM data | Yes | No (authored scenario templates) |
| Multi-persona calls / post-call workflow practice | Yes (up to 3 personas, plus CRM logging) | No |
What Is Synthesia?
Synthesia is a London-based AI video platform. Its core product lets businesses generate "talking head" training and marketing videos using AI avatars, without a camera, a studio, or an actor.
Type a script, pick from 240+ stock avatars or build a custom one from your own filmed likeness, and Synthesia turns it into a polished video in minutes.
It also does AI voice generation and translation into more than 160 languages, so one training video becomes dozens of localized versions with no reshoot.
Customers include Heineken and Zoom, and Synthesia says it passes compliance audits at 90%+ of the Fortune 100, real enterprise depth to show for it.
For most of its history, Synthesia was a passive-content tool: you watched the video, maybe took a quiz. That changed on July 22, 2026, when Synthesia launched Roleplay Sessions, the first product under a new "Sessions" platform.
Instead of just watching a video, an employee now has a live spoken conversation with an AI avatar persona, an angry customer, a skeptical prospect, an underperforming direct report, and gets automated, rubric-based scoring plus AI coaching feedback afterward.
CEO Victor Riparbelli has framed it as a shift from "watching training videos" to practicing skills "with granular data on how a sales force is doing overall," and named cold calls and discovery calls as flagship use cases.
That's the piece we're reviewing here: not Synthesia the video generator, but Synthesia as an AI sales roleplay tool.
Screenshot: Synthesia's Roleplay Sessions feature page, captured directly from synthesia.io, August 2026.
Synthesia Pricing
The core video platform's pricing is fully public. Roleplay Sessions is not.
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 10 min video/mo, 9 avatars |
| Starter | $29/mo ($18/mo billed yearly) | 10 min/mo, 125+ avatars, 1 personal avatar, logo removal, AI dubbing |
| Creator | $89/mo ($64/mo billed yearly) | 30 min/mo, 180+ avatars, 5 personal avatars, API access, interactive videos |
| Enterprise | Custom, contact sales | Unlimited video minutes, 240+ avatars, unlimited personal avatars, SSO/SAML, SCORM export, dedicated CSM |
Source: synthesia.io/pricing.
Roleplay Sessions is not included in any of these tiers. Synthesia's own help center confirms it's a paid add-on with no public price listed anywhere on the site, contact sales required.
It's currently rolling out to existing enterprise customers first, with broader availability planned later in 2026 as inference costs come down. Access is Enterprise-tier only, too: there's no self-serve signup or trial for Roleplay Sessions, "talk to sales" is the only path in today.
A Google-indexed snippet of Synthesia's own pricing page once suggested a $1,000/year add-on price for annual-plan accounts, but a direct, live fetch of that page didn't surface the number. Treat it as unconfirmed, not an official Synthesia figure.
Separately, a third-party comparison site, arcade.software, estimates Synthesia's Enterprise contracts broadly in the $20,000 to $100,000+/year range. That figure is for the video platform overall, not the roleplay add-on specifically, and it isn't an official Synthesia number either.
If you're evaluating this for a sales team, budget for a sales conversation before you budget a dollar amount.
Practically: you're paying for a video subscription, then paying again, at an unpublished rate, to get access to the one feature that's actually sales roleplay.
Synthesia Features
Video authoring (the mature part). AI avatar generation from 240+ stock avatars or a custom likeness, AI voice generation across 1,000+ voices, script-to-video, and translation and dubbing into 160+ languages.
It also covers interactive video with quizzes and branching paths, video analytics (views, watch time, drop-off), Brand Kit templates, SCORM export for LMS integration, API access, and team collaboration tools.
This is what Synthesia has spent years building and it shows.
Roleplay Sessions (the new part). A "Session" runs in three stages: a short scripted teaching scene (2 to 5 minutes), a live roleplay scene where a talking AI avatar persona asks questions and pushes back, then an automated feedback scene.
Scoring is rubric-based per competency, Synthesia is explicit that it's "not one pass/fail number," and is based on what the learner actually said rather than a checklist.
An AI coach walks the learner through the results, and manager-side analytics show pass rates, per-skill scores, and improvement across attempts, with drill-down to transcripts and synced audio.
Pre-built scenario templates cover cold calls, discovery calls, manager feedback conversations, customer support, and retail or frontline sales.
You can build custom scenarios too, and Synthesia has already published dedicated landing pages for cold-call, discovery-call, and sales-roleplay scenarios specifically, which shows real investment in the sales use case.
One narrowing worth knowing: roleplay conversations currently run in English, German, Spanish, and French, a much smaller set than the 160+ languages Synthesia supports for video translation. If your team roleplays in a language outside those four, this feature doesn't reach you yet.
What we did not find any evidence of, checking Synthesia's own pages, help center, and press coverage: multi-persona or multi-stakeholder calls, a gatekeeper or cold-call-screening phase, and simulation of the post-call CRM or workflow logging.
Nor did we find scoring built from a customer's own playbook or call history, rather than Synthesia's authored scenario templates.
What Users Say
Because Roleplay Sessions is under a month old, there's no review coverage of it yet on G2 or Capterra. Every quote below is about the legacy video platform, which is still useful for judging how Synthesia builds and supports product, just not evidence on the roleplay feature itself.
On ease of use: "I was able to roll out a professional and polished product to the entire company within a fraction of the time it would normally take to produce," wrote a People Operations Specialist on Capterra.
On support: "Great customer support. Product works great and I have not found any other like it," wrote a Founder on GetApp, part of the same Gartner Digital Markets review network as Capterra.
On the other side, a Founder in IT services wrote on Capterra: "I had videos approved, only to have nearly identical versions later flagged without explanation. When I reached out, I received vague responses that provided no real clarity on what was wrong."
Another Capterra reviewer, a Lecturer in education, described content getting rejected over "stringent rules that couldn't accept the images just due to simple brightness issue," a milder version of the same moderation-consistency complaint.
The same pattern shows up beyond Capterra: a President reviewing Synthesia via GetApp (part of the Gartner Digital Markets network) wrote, "Support was an AI bot that told me the charge was non-refundable."
Screenshot: a negative Synthesia review, captured directly from G2, August 2026.
Synthesia's own site cites a 4.7/5 rating from 2,000+ reviews on G2, a figure this research couldn't independently re-verify since G2 blocks automated access to its review pages.
It lines up with the split above: real praise for ease of use and speed, alongside recurring complaints about content moderation and support.
Where Synthesia Falls Short
For sales roleplay specifically, the gaps are structural, not cosmetic.
Roleplay Sessions is brand new, launched under a month before this review, paid as a separate add-on with no public price, and rolling out enterprise-first. That's a genuinely untested capability, not a mature one.
There's no evidence Synthesia grades against a customer's own playbook, SOP, or CRM data. Its rubrics read as authored scenario templates, closer to traditional L&D content than to scoring built from how your team actually sells.
It doesn't do multi-persona calls, so no practicing a committee-based deal with more than one stakeholder in the room. There's no gatekeeper or cold-call-screening phase.
There's no simulation of the post-call CRM or workflow logging, so the practice stops the moment the conversation ends, when in a real deal the process work after the call is often where reps lose the most ground.
And it only scores the roleplay itself. There's no unified view tying practice performance to how reps actually perform on live calls, which matters if you're trying to prove coaching moves real revenue numbers rather than completion rates.
If these gaps rule Synthesia out entirely for your team, our Synthesia alternatives roundup compares it against Yoodli, Second Nature, Hyperbound, and other dedicated roleplay platforms.
Where Synthesia Genuinely Wins
Give credit where it's due. Synthesia already has deep enterprise trust, with customers like Heineken and Zoom, and can cross-sell roleplay into an existing video-training relationship with none of the new-vendor friction a standalone roleplay tool has to overcome.
In risk-averse enterprise procurement, that matters more than feature parity.
The avatar and video technology itself is more mature than most roleplay-first vendors can offer, because Synthesia's whole company pedigree is avatar and video generation, not conversational AI bolted onto a video product.
240+ stock avatars, custom-likeness creation, and translation into 160+ languages for the authoring side are hard to match.
And having teaching video and roleplay practice live in the same authoring surface, the "Studio," is a real integration story. If your L&D team already builds onboarding video in Synthesia, adding a scored practice scene to that same workflow has a genuine convenience advantage.
Synthesia's compliance stack for Roleplay Sessions is a genuine edge in two specific spots, too: ISO 42001, an AI-management-systems certification, and EU data residency, both live at launch.
Outdoo AI already matches on SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and ISO 27701, so those two certs are the real, narrow gap, not a broader compliance lead.
How Outdoo AI Compares
Outdoo AI starts from a different premise: roleplay should be built from what your team actually does, not from a template library.
Roleplay agents are built directly from your team's real calls, transcripts, playbooks, battlecards, and even LinkedIn profiles, so a rep practices against something closer to their actual pipeline than a generic persona.
Synthesia's own CEO makes part of this case for us. Victor Riparbelli told TechCrunch, "Video performs way better than text... but for most things, we learn the best by actually practicing," a candid admission that the one-way video product Synthesia spent eight years building doesn't build skill on its own.
Every Outdoo AI scorecard is graded against your own playbook and SOP instead (grading against your playbook, not generic AI advice), the same gap that shows up in Synthesia's authored scenario templates.
Access is a gap too. Roleplay Sessions is sold Enterprise-only, by custom quote, with no self-serve signup or trial today. A team can start evaluating Outdoo AI's roleplay and coaching platform without clearing an enterprise sales cycle first.
Outdoo AI also runs one scorecard across both roleplay practice and live calls, so leaders can show that coaching moves real revenue metrics, not just completion counts, something Synthesia's roleplay-only scoring doesn't do.
Where Synthesia caps roleplay at one persona per session, Outdoo AI supports multi-persona calls with up to three stakeholders, useful for committee-based B2B and renewal deals.
Practice extends past the conversation itself, too: reps rehearse the post-call CRM and workflow logging in the same session, not just the talk track, which is close to unique in this space.
And where Synthesia's roleplay currently runs in four languages against a video product that translates into 160+, Outdoo AI's voice roleplay already covers 74+ languages, with 120+ supported across the platform overall.
Pricing is usage-based rather than a flat per-seat license stacked on top of an unpublished add-on fee, which matters if you want cost tied to actual training activity instead of idle seats.
Frequently Asked Questions
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It's a live, spoken practice conversation with an AI avatar persona, followed by rubric-based automated scoring and AI coaching feedback. It launched July 22, 2026, as an add-on to Synthesia's existing video platform, and covers scenarios like cold calls, discovery calls, and manager feedback conversations.
No. Synthesia's [published pricing](https://www.synthesia.io/pricing) covers Free, Starter, Creator, and Enterprise video plans only. Roleplay Sessions is a separate paid add-on with no public price, contact sales required. An indexed snippet once suggested $1,000/year, but a live fetch of the pricing page didn't confirm that figure.
It's a reasonable fit if you already run Synthesia for training video and want a light layer of scored practice on top.
Not yet. Roleplay Sessions is a month old, enterprise-first, and scores only the practice conversation itself. It doesn't tie roleplay performance to live-call outcomes or your CRM data the way a purpose-built sales roleplay and coaching platform does.
Roleplay conversations currently run in English, German, Spanish, and French, a much smaller set than the 160+ languages Synthesia supports for video translation and dubbing.
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