NBCUniversal just unveiled major AI upgrades coming to the Peacock mobile app. Headlining the rollout is "Your Bravoverse," which uses a Synthesia-generated avatar of host Andy Cohen and AI agents to curate personalized, swipeable feeds across 5,000 hours of Bravo content. Peacock is also rolling out AI-driven real-time cropping for live NBA broadcasts in vertical 9:16 this spring.
SpAItial just emerged from stealth with a $13 million seed round to build spatial foundation models that turn text or images into fully interactive 3D environments. Founded by Synthesia co-founder Matthias Niessner alongside ex-Google and Meta researchers, the Munich startup directly takes on heavyweights like World Labs and Odyssey. Early signups are now open via waitlist.
Several actors who licensed their faces and voices to AI video platforms like Synthesia are facing a harsh reality: their digital clones are appearing in scam health ads, doomsday rants, and foreign political propaganda. Thanks to broad, irrevocable contract clauses signed for quick cash, many have zero legal power to take the videos down.
Synthesia just launched a $1M equity fund to grant stock options to the human actors behind its most popular stock avatars, vesting monthly over up to four years. Previously, actors only received flat licensing fees for three-year stints. Why it matters: it’s an unusual step toward revenue sharing and mutual buy-in between synthetic media platforms and real human talent.
Synthesia just launched Synthesia 2.0, upgrading its AI video platform with personalized avatars shot via webcam or phone and multi-language voice cloning in over 30 tongues. It also previewed next-gen full-body avatars that can talk with their hands later this year. It's making studio-grade corporate video production as simple as typing a doc.
Synthesia just rolled out Expressive Avatars, an upgrade that brings real emotions and tighter lip-sync to its corporate video presenters. Instead of stitching together pre-recorded video clips, the avatars are generated entirely on the fly using multimodal deep learning. Why it matters: It takes the robotic edge off training and marketing videos, though getting hands right remains a work in progress.
Synthesia just used five minutes of video footage to create a hyper-realistic synthetic video of soccer legend Lionel Messi speaking fluent English and up to 10 other languages. Messi rarely speaks English in public, and fans pointed out that the lip-sync was eerily convincing. Why it matters: Deep learning video tools are turning cross-lingual video dubbing into a turnkey reality.
