British AI startup Synthesia launched a new product called Roleplay Sessions on July 22, 2026. Until now, the company was known for making AI-generated training videos for businesses. The new product is different: instead of watching a video, an employee talks directly with an AI-generated character on screen. The character can talk back, disagree, and then score the employee on how well they handled the conversation. TechCrunch

The conversations are simulated high-stakes situations — sales pitches, performance reviews, customer complaints. Roleplay is the first release under a broader platform Synthesia calls Sessions. CEO and co-founder Victor Riparbelli's company plans to expand Sessions into job interviews and candidate screening, according to what TechCrunch exclusively learned. That would move Synthesia from training into hiring, which involves a different buyer, different legal rules, and different risks.

The two most popular use cases among early customers are sales team training and leadership or soft-skills development, particularly practicing difficult conversations. Customers can build their own training programs on the platform or bring in Synthesia's consultants for custom solutions built from the company's existing training documents.

Roleplay already has real commercial deployments. Early customers include one of the top three companies by market cap in Europe, one of the top five Fortune 100, and one of the biggest recruitment companies globally. The product is currently available only to large enterprises, but Synthesia intends to open it to small businesses, independent professionals, and educational institutions within the next few months as the cost of running the AI declines.

The technology behind the product is built in two parts. Synthesia's own technology creates the avatars and voices — what you see and hear. The thinking and conversational ability comes from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. This is a common pattern in today's AI products: a company with expertise in one area, like synthetic video, partners with a large AI model provider for the reasoning. It does create a dependency on OpenAI and means Synthesia's quality is partly tied to how good OpenAI's models get. But it lets a startup like Synthesia build a conversational product without developing its own reasoning system from scratch.

Synthesia bases its approach on learning research from Rice University's Doerr Institute, which found that practice and feedback — not just watching and listening — are what actually change behavior. In that sense, Roleplay is not a new idea but an old teaching method with a new twist: the practice partner is a synthetic character instead of a human.

The shift from passive video to interactive practice mirrors changes we have seen elsewhere. Chatbots moved from scripted menus to free-flowing conversation. Coding tools moved from simple text completion to systems that can handle multi-step tasks. Training is now moving from watch-and-learn to talk-and-be-coached. The economic logic is simple. Human coaching does not scale across an entire workforce. An AI avatar that can run unlimited sessions at low cost does.

In my view, the planned expansion into candidate screening deserves attention. A training simulation that gives a low score has limited consequences. A job interview scored by AI, where that score influences whether someone gets hired, is a different matter. This kind of use is already under regulatory scrutiny under the EU's AI Act and various U.S. state and local laws covering automated hiring tools. The fact that a major recruitment company is already an early customer suggests this is not just a theoretical concern.

Synthesia's bet is that the cost of running AI will fall fast enough to open the product to more customers within months, not years. The two-part architecture means the conversational quality improves each time OpenAI releases a better model, without Synthesia having to do that work itself. Whether the Sessions platform can extend from training into hiring — and whether customers and regulators will accept AI-scored interview performance — will determine whether Synthesia stays a training company or becomes something broader.