Introducing Roleplay Sessions: Interactive Coaching and Practice with Avatars

Today, we’re introducing Roleplay Sessions, the first of a new category of AI-powered conversations from our upcoming Sessions platform that helps people work better. We’re starting with roleplays: helping people practice critical conversations and get personalized coaching. But the same technology will eventually power other scalable, knowledge-driven conversations. 

Roleplay Sessions offers businesses the ability to inform people with AI video, then help them practice the conversations and scenarios that matter, get personalized, in-the-moment coaching and feedback, and measure their skill uplift over time. 

Employees can now step into a real conversation with an Avatar that talks, asks questions, and pushes back, practicing as long and as often as they want, while managers can take actions where needed.

A workforce reckoning is underway

There is a widening gap between what employees know and what they can actually do. By 2027, 44% of workers’ core skills will be disrupted, yet 63% of employers say they lack the capability to close that skill gap fast enough.

A meta-analysis from Rice University of 300+ peer-reviewed studies identifies three essential elements for effective learning: inform, demonstrate, and practice. Most enterprise training nails the first two, but practice at scale is where it breaks down. Managers lack time to coach, and quality varies wildly when they do. And without measurement, leaders have no way to know if their training is actually working or whether people are actually improving, which skills are driving performance, what teams need more coaching, or if the investment is paying off. 

One platform, the entire learning-to-doing loop

With Roleplay Sessions, we bring the inform, practice, coach and measure layers all into one platform built on Synthesia, trusted by 90% of the Fortune 100.

Inform with AI Video

Synthesia, the leading AI video platform for business, already powers the first two layers. Companies have been using our platform to inform employees and demonstrate what good looks like, with benefits including:

• Engaging content that sticks: Knowledge content seamlessly turned into video.
• Studio-quality video: Lifelike Avatars and voiceovers, no cameras or production studios.
• Content in 160+ languages: Create once, deploy globally.
• Fast, affordable and scalable: Up to 90% less time and cost than traditional video production.

Practice with Roleplays

Learners practice real conversations with Interactive Avatars tailored to your scenarios and company needs. Whether it’s a sales discovery, a manager giving feedback, or a customer complaint - if it’s a conversation that matters, it can be practiced. This provides: 

• Customizable scenarios, personas, and skills: You define the conversations your team needs to practice.
• Real conversations with presence: The Interactive Avatar has a face, natural expression, and responds in real time, unlike voice-only or chatbots.
• Unlimited practice and repetition: Retry instantly; learners voluntarily return even after passing.
• Multiple languages: Practice and feedback in English, German, Spanish, and French to start, with more languages added soon.

Coach in real time

Before any score appears, the AI coach asks learners to reflect, then walks them through their performance. This delivers:

• Reflection before the score: The coach opens with a conversation, allowing feedback to be absorbed rather than dismissed and it builds the habit of self-correction that carries into the real conversation.
• A real coaching conversation: Ask follow-ups, request better examples, explore why an approach didn’t land - like you would with a human coach. It's a two-way conversation, not a one-way readout.
• Scored against the skills that matter: Every session is graded against a rubric built for the role - an overall score plus a skill-by-skill breakdown.
• Available 24/7, at scale: Every learner gets the full coaching experience on every attempt, without a human coach in the room.

Measure what actually drives performance

Every score rolls up into a dashboard so managers can see which skills correlate with real performance - which are often not the ones they expected. The platform provides:

• Understanding of the skills that drive your business: Surface which competencies actually correlate with performance.
• Analysis of progress across the team: See score distributions at a glance - where teams need support and where they excel. 
• Progress learners can see: Every attempt is tracked, so learners can watch their own score climb over time - not just managers.

Enterprise-ready from day one

Because the whole loop lives in Synthesia, everything (including content, practice, coaching, and proof) sits in one place instead of being stitched across separate tools. Roleplay Sessions also integrates with your existing stack - HRIS sync with BambooHR, HiBob, or Workday, and export directly into your LMS via SCORM. 

Roleplay Sessions also let new hires build skills on day one that typically take years to accumulate. For the first time, inform, coach, practice and measure work as one system, compressing years of experience into weeks.

And it’s built for the enterprise from the start: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, 27701, and 42001 certification, GDPR compliance with EU data residency, and SSO/SCIM for access control.

The proof is already here

Results from early pilots speak for themselves: at a Fortune 10 company, learners using Roleplay Sessions saw their soft skill improvement go up by over 110% and technical acumen improved by over 80% within a few weeks. Nearly 70% of users came back voluntarily to practice again. 

At a leading recruitment firm, participants saw an almost 30% average skill uplift against a +10% target while every core skill measured improved by 20% or more.

At a leading European company, Roleplay Sessions was used for management training, giving leaders a space to practice high-stakes conversations. The company selected Synthesia following a rigorous evaluation against competing solutions - and feedback from the pilot team was very strong, with clear momentum toward a wider rollout.

Available today

The Roleplay Sessions possibilities are endless: we are starting with sales enablement, management training, and customer support – plus the ability to build a custom Roleplay. From there, we’ll keep expanding what our platform can do – moving into other kinds of Sessions.

Want to try a Roleplay Session yourself right now? Try it here.

‍