TL;DR
- AI avatars split into two distinct sub-categories: brand avatars focused on UGC and social media content (like TikTok Symphony) versus traditional AI avatars originally designed for training videos.
- The technology now offers exciting features like cloning yourself (digital twin creation with tools like Laria), cloning your voice (significantly improved in recent months), and near-perfect automated captions, enabling complete custom avatar creation with personalized video messages.
- Eventually brand avatars will weaken Robert Cialdini's "social proof" principle of persuasion since AI-generated testimonial videos are completely fake.
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About The Best AI Avatar Comparison
I'm sure you've seen AI avatars on your feed before, the hype on social media was real, at first purely as a reference for what these AI avatars can do, playing around with them or cloning themselves. Now we've come to the next stage: Brands are actuall using them already for ads, content and testimonials. Often they are hardly distinguishable from real people, or at least if you don't look too closely.
One company sticks out to me: HeyGen. Because their avatars feel incredibly life-like, their voices have much more intonation and personality, and the platform is constantly adding new features, the latest being a motion graphic designer tool. I could bet they are aiming to become an all-in-one creative tool soon and will do a great job in delivering every video genAI feature. This company clearly wants to grab both audiences for avatars: brands (for UGC creation) and enterprises (for training and development).
But let's a step back and let me explain these two: Brand avatars came out after the early industry has focused more on stiffer AI avatars for training and development. Then they understood that UGC (user generated content) for social media and websites is a much bigger market and have put the avatars in more realistic settings and given them a natural look.
Brands of all sizes can create videos from A to Z with AI now, like with HeyGen, TikTok Symphony or Mirage. You can either just input the brand name, a website, and few more markers and the tool will completely create the content: copy, add an avatar, background music, add images and captions.
The created AI video is not always great and I think marketers should control the narrative about their brand more. So I recommend the alternative: to input your own copy, photos, logos, etc. and let the AI take care of the avatar creation and assembling everything.
What has massively improved so that many of the YouTube Ads I see are AI-generated avatars now are lip sync, voice, and movements. When in their early stages the voices sounded robotic, today you can add pauses, correct the pronounciation and choose out of so many voices. Lip sync is still a challenge for some of the companies, but HeyGen or Mirage have cracked this area mostly too.
Exciting AI Avatar features
Clone yourself
Is a feature I've seen a lot on social media and I've tried it with a free trial on Colossyan, but the result wasn't mind blowing. So either social media is lying (Can that be true?!) or I should have tried Laria. They are a super new brand focusing on brand avatars. I'm on their waiting list to clone myself and create my digital twin to share the video with you asap on my LinkedIn. The videos I've seen from them make me think that this is a more realistic avatar maker.
Clone your voice
Is feature I've also seen in the
video editor section, for example, veed.io offers this. And this impressed me because in just a couple of weeks the technology has improved so significantly. When I first tested this custom AI feature, I felt like it didn't sound like me at all. The next try was much better already for AI-generated voice.
Captions
Pretty similar to the point above, the companies have improved on this so much that nowadays they are almost perfect. The only thing that really confuses the tool are brand names (ChatGPT for example still turns to JPT and such), but that's easy to correct with personalized video messages.
Brand Avatars Will Shake Up Marketing Principals
This section makes me, a video marketer who has worked for big brands like Revolut and HelloFresh, a bit squirmish. So now we can create video testimonials aka UGC videos in a few minutes? Without a real person actually recommending the brand?
On the long run this will weaken one of Robert Cialdini’s six “principals of persuasion”. I’m talking about
social proof, which of course doesn’t work anymore if the testimonial video is completely fake.
But, I’m not here to lecture you about old marketing rules, I’m here to test the newest AI tools and in this instance AI brand avatar generators such as TikTok’s Symphony below, so let’s go!
Generally there are three video generator sub-categories: video editors, video GenAI tools and AI Avatars. You are currently in the AI Avatar section of our video generator comparison. AI avatars are the smallest section of video generators, at least until now. But so far their industry has focused more on avatars for training videos, now it's getting exciting!
AI Avatars & Brand Avatars
Most famous Tool: TikTok Symphony, Colossyan, HeyGen, Synthesia
Use cases: UGC, website videos, training videos, presentations, online courses
What it does: Upload a script and let an AI avatar speak for you. Admittedly the quality of AI avatars and generated voices differs a lot.
Who will love this: Anyone who doesn’t like to stand in front of a camera. Your home setup takes too much time or the studio rent is too high? Not a problem with today’s AI avatars.