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AI talking avatars day 1
Creating my own learning roadmap in the lead up to https://lu.ma/ygcyy3dt
I hated talking heads. I never really understood why it mattered. But it is truly all the rage. In January 2025 Synthesia raised another $180m and brought its company valuation to $2.1bn. So between venture capital chasing something non-valuable or that I probably missing something, I will spend 20 days assuming the latter.
In these instances, the primary use case is Learning and Development, explainers, sales enablement, business development, knowledge management and SOP/ training:
In terms of return on investment, AI avatars supposedly have a significant benefit for sales enablement and marketing with positive social validation of cost reduction (reduction in costs per click); increase in conversions:
2 years ago, it still took quite a bit of effort and custom code to get a talking head up in production (and still have a long way to production-grade video quality):
