How to Automate Your Customer Communication Using an AI-Based Video Maker | Synthesia.io Review

It's not often that I'm approached by someone with a product or service that genuinely blows my mind, and has SO much potential for the future. But that's what the sponsors of this post have done. 

Yep, this is a sponsored post - but genuinely... just... just wait.

Those of you regular readers and viewers of my YouTube channel will know that I am a big fan when it comes to automation. Be that home automation or business automation.

So when the sponsor of today's post approached me about making a video, I already had my feet firmly in the 'HELL YES' side of the court.

When we got talking and I started to understand how powerful this tool can be within your business, and it has some fun personal use cases too - well now I'm REALLY interested.

Like - they didn't have to pay me, because DAMN. If it does what I think it can do!

Game changer.

INTRO

If this is your first time here - then hi, my name is Pete, and on this blog you can find posts around tech, business, and finance (sounds like Step Brothers!), So if you're looking for reviews on the latest gadgets, interested on using tech to help grow your business, or wanting to be smarter with your money - then please head over to my YouTube channel and subscribe for more.

WHAT IS SYNTHESIA?

I'm going to tell you exactly what Synthesia is, what it's capable of, and how you can use it to really, really up your game when it comes to automating customer communications - or just sending some cool things to your friends.

If you haven't already, then I'd also recommend you go watch this video about Active Campaign automations, where I talk about automatically onboarding your customers, and this, you'll find in a moment, can tie in SO nicely together.

So first up, what is Synthesia. Synthesia is, and I quote 'on a mission to turn cameras into code and make everyone a creator'. And that's pretty accurate!

In a nutshell, it is a service that uses AI to generate stunning videos, just by typing in text. Essentially saying goodbye to actors, film crews, and all that expensive equipment...

When you sign up you get access to a whole range of something like 30+ photorealistic avatars which you can use to start immediately creating personalised videos which you can send to your customers. You can also choose from 40+ languages, which brings a whole new level of personalisation.

It is literally as simple as writing an email or a script. You literally type in the box what you want the computer to say - and it will both speak it, AND match the lip and face movement to be pretty much spot on.

Sounds great so far right?

The next level up is that you can actually upload your own video to their AI system, which will in turn create your own avatar (or digital twin). It's video only for now as they can't yet use AI to build a fake voice for you. But instead, you can use your face along with their existing AI voices.

Simply sit in front of a green screen, read the script a few times, send the footage to them, and a few days later your own avatar will be available to use.

Head over to my channel to see the video of this post for examples of what your avatar can look like. 

From here, you can just create the videos you want, with the audio you want in them, press a button, and out pops a video at the other end.

Now the magic, the gold dust in this product - the very first question that I asked them when I had my call with Synthesia was.

Does it hook in with Zapier?

In fact, I think I actually phrased it along the lines of "You guys should look at hooking it in with something like Zapier, that would be a KILLER app to have access to as a business"

And their response was just... Yeah, it does that already!

So for those of you who aren't already using Zapier, it's basically a really simple system where you can automate tasks.

For this example, When a new customer signs up, then do this...

When a new customer signs up, add them to our CRM system, send them a few welcome emails, order them a welcome gift, bottle of wine, or whatever, and then NOW we can use Synthesia to automatically, with zero input from you, send them a welcome email, with a welcome VIDEO of you welcoming them as a customer.

Or, if you haven't got access to your own avatar, then you can use one of their built-in faces.

But it's still, really powerful.

Just imagine the possibilities of someone buying a product online, only to be met with an email in your inbox a few minutes later saying 'Thanks Julie, for buying XYZ product. I hope you are happy with your purchase, but if not, feel free to drop me a message here....'

And for the IT Space. Someone signs up for a support agreement, you can send them a welcome video to explain what happens next.

Totally automatically.

Completely personalised with the person's name, their company name, maybe the service they signed up for, and any other specifics around their company or your offering - It's just absolutely insane with the possibilities of this thing.

ONBOARDING 

I'm now going to run you through how my 'onboarding' process works, and how I bring Synthesia into it for a real-world use case.

Flip over to Active Campaign, and you can see here that I have automation for customer onboarding for my IT Coaching business.

Right now, the automation adds a few tags, it sends an email to order champagne and brownies as a welcome gift and also fires off a few emails.

But next, I'm going to fire a webhook. This webhook is going to fire over to Zapier.

In Zapier, we create a new Zap. When Webhook is triggered, give that a test. And now we're going to select Synthesia as the Action.

With this, we can now set out what we want the person to say, pull in the various text fields over from Active Campaign, and away it goes to generate that video.

What we then ALSO want to do is create a second zap that fires when a new video is created in Synthesia, this can then fire the email over to the end-user, or customer who has signed up or wherever you want it to go now.

All we have to do now is sign up a new customer, and they will automatically get all of the cool stuff. The brownies, the champagne, AND a personalised, automated video, to welcome and thank them for signing up.

How cool is that?

THE COST

You're probably thinking, Pete - this is really cool tech, but it's going to be stupidly expensive.

Nope.

Nope, it's not at all.

$30 per month for up to 10 videos, or get in touch about their Corporate pricing if you want more.

That is - just mind-blowing to get 10 AI-generated videos for $30 per month.

You do have to pay an additional cost to get your own personalised avatar, yes. But it's still a pretty small cost in comparison to the results you can get with this.

The only other thing to mention at the time of making this review is that you currently can't use Zapier to generate personalised avatars using your own face, which is coming very soon, and that to get access to the Zapier integration you'll need to drop them an email first to be invited - but in my testing, it has been flawless.

So follow the link down below to get started, even just to play and see what it's capable of because it's mind-blowing how easy it all is - otherwise thank you so much for reading.

🛒 Sign up for Synthesia: https://geni.us/AgZIVH