A TechCrunch reporter got cloned into four Synthesia avatars — two personal, two interactive, the interactive pair trained on exactly one story and deterministic by design; Synthesia's API page lists pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.12 a minute

“Synthesia cloned a TechCrunch reporter into four talking avatars with a photo shoot and a two-minute voice recording — and the talkative ones can only ever discuss one story.”

Usable claims

• On Saturday, September 26, 2026 (calendar-verified), TechCrunch published (Dominic-Madori Davis, 7:00 AM PDT) a first-person account of creating interactive digital avatars of herself with Synthesia. The setup, per TechCrunch: Synthesia's head of corporate affairs Alexandru Voica already had an interactive virtual avatar trained to answer common press questions about the company, which the reporter calls "the final boss of using AI in PR." Company context, per TechCrunch: "It hit a $4 billion valuation earlier this year and said last year it had crossed $100 million in ARR." The capture process, per TechCrunch: "I entered a mini film studio nestled inside Synthesia's office where they took numerous photos of me and captured a two-minute recording of my voice." What she got, per TechCrunch: "They created a personal avatar for me (one that just reads whatever script I give it) — with and without glasses — and they made two interactive avatars for me (ones that can talk back and listen to me), also with and without glasses." The interactive avatar is single-story scoped, per TechCrunch: "It is trained on my story about why venture-backed startups commit more fraud than non-VC-backed startups and will only answer questions about that story." Per TechCrunch, the reporter states this is the first time the company has made a digital avatar for a journalist (or for anyone outside of Voica) — stated in the article's own voice, paraphrased here because the article's rendering of that sentence misspells the company name. The tech stack, per TechCrunch: "built my interactive avatar, which is powered by a combination of voice-to-text, video, language, and text-to-voice models." And: "My avatar's tech stack includes Synthesia's own video and voice models, although the company also allows customers to choose alternatives from other labs like Cartesia, ElevenLabs, Google, or OpenAI." Build time, per TechCrunch: "It took the Synthesia team a couple of days to make my avatars." Behavior, per TechCrunch: the interactive avatar "is deterministic, meaning it will only say what it was trained to respond to. In this case, that was my venture fraud story." — and when her parents asked it questions "only they would know", "the model didn't answer, redirecting them each time to the venture fraud story." The friends-and-family verdict, per TechCrunch: "My friends didn't think the voice sounded much like mine and thought the likeness was not as good as the personal avatar, but nonetheless it was close enough to be somewhat creepy." And the mom's line: "I don't remember giving birth to two of you," she joked after testing the model. Synthesia's own Interactive Avatars product page (opened this run; undated) states the product definition: "Build Interactive Avatars that can listen, talk, and respond directly inside your product, website, or internal tools." The page documents a LiveKit plugin integration — install the plugin, attach an AvatarSession, go live — with the capability line "Any LLM, any tools, any knowledge base.", marks the LiveKit bring-your-own-LLM path "Available now" while both a Pipecat plugin and an end-to-end managed option are "Coming soon", lists pay-as-you-go pricing at $0.12 per minute, and includes the use case "Role-play difficult conversations, with rubric scoring via webhook."