Lip sync and avatars

Synthesia Express-2

Name: Synthesia Express-2
Author: Synthesia

Combined video and voice engine that generates full-body avatars which gesture, not just talk.

A lip sync and avatar tool by Synthesia · read 2026-08-14 · sourcing high

Resolution: 1920x1080
Weights: Not released
API: Yes
Commercial use: Permitted subject to conditions

Express-Voice clones a voice in context without fine-tuning, preserving accent and expressiveness, while Express-Video (Express-Animate, Express-Eval and an Express-Render diffusion transformer) turns speech into gestures, facial dynamics and photorealistic frames. Outputs 1080p at 30fps at arbitrary length without identity drift; Synthesia reports about 8 minutes of production compute per minute of output, with a distilled two-step Express-Render-Turbo variant in development.

Commercial use — Permitted subject to conditions

Commercial use is included on all plans, including the free tier.

Depends on your plan tier. Commercial use is included on all plans, including the free tier

The conditions above were extracted from the licence notes recorded during research, and each one shows the sentence it came from so you can check the reading. Read the licence before you rely on any of this. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and this site does not tell you a model is cleared for commercial use.

Specification

Vendor figures, read 2026-08-14Read from Synthesia's own documentation on 2026-08-14. Vendors change these between model versions without announcing it, so check theirs before you commit a shot to a number. Sourcing for this entry is strong: the figures came from pages we retrieved and read. Check the vendor's current documentation

What it takes in: text, audio, image
What it makes: video, audio
Maximum duration: not established
Maximum resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratios: not established
Controls: avatar-from-photo, avatar-from-video, lipsync, voice-clone, translation
Weights: Not released
API: Yes
Pricing: Subscription with credits: Basic free (10 min/mo, 1,200 credits, no download), Starter $18/mo billed yearly or $29/mo monthly (120 min/yr, 14,500 credits/yr), Creator $64/mo billed yearly or $89/mo monthly (360 min/yr, 44,000 credits/yr, API access), Enterprise custom (unlimited minutes). Avatar counts scale from 9 stock avatars on Basic to 240+ on Enterprise; personal avatars from 3 to unlimited.
Released or updated: 2025-09-04

Maximum duration and supported aspect ratios are not established here. That means no page we could retrieve stated them, not that the model lacks them.

Strengths

Arbitrary-length 1080p output with no identity drift, unusual at this quality level
Full-body gesture generation rather than head-and-shoulders lipsync
Explicit creative controls: seed, movement intensity, camera framing independent of audio, voice styles
Commercial use included on every tier

Weaknesses

1080p ceiling on all tiers including Enterprise; no 4K
Roughly 8 minutes of compute per output minute in production, so turnaround is slow
API only from the Creator tier upward
Free tier cannot download videos

Best for

Enterprise training and internal comms video
Multilingual product and policy explainers
Presenter-led content where gesture matters

Where the sources disagree

Recorded rather than resolved. Picking the tidier number would hide the fact that the vendor's own pages do not agree.

A search snippet claimed Express-2 launched in September 2026; the Synthesia post itself is dated 2025-09-04, so the snippet is wrong and the vendor date is used. Duration is described as 'arbitrary' with no numeric cap, so maxDurationSeconds is null; effective length is bounded by plan minutes instead. The launch post says Express-2 is available to paying customers while the pricing page does not break Express-2 out by tier.

What to understand before using it

Explainers naming the mechanisms this model's own documentation mentions.

Temporal consistency: flicker, drift and morphing names “identity drift”
LoRAs and fine-tuning: teaching a model your subject names “fine-tuning”
Diffusion models: generation by denoising names “diffusion”
Training data and copyright: what is not settled names “training”

MCP servers that front Synthesia

Servers in the media MCP directory whose own description or homepage names this vendor. Absence of a server here is not evidence that none exists: most publish no tool list at all.

Framesail Video generation
Create long-form YouTube videos end to end: script, storyboard, voiceover, final MP4.
Prizmad Video generation
Generate AI UGC video ads from any product URL, avatars, voiceover, OAuth Connect.
Shortgenius Video generation
Generate AI short-form videos and auto-publish them to TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X.
Vivideo Video generation
AI video generation via the Vivideo API: auto or manual mode, avatars, voices, brand kits.

See it from the vendor

Shotcraft hosts no sample output. Judging a model means watching its own showreel with your own eyes, and a clip re-hosted here would be a clip we chose.

Nearby in the directory

Flawless DeepEditor and TrueSync

Neural performance editing tools for film and episodic post. DeepEditor applies new dialogue to existing shots and refines performances, covering in-v

Lip sync and avatars

Hedra character / avatar platform

Character and avatar video platform that has grown into a unified inference API putting multiple leading image, video and audio models behind one API

Lip sync and avatars

HeyGen Avatar IV (and Avatar V)

Avatar IV is HeyGen's current default avatar engine, driving a photo, consented digital twin or studio avatar from either a typed script (text to spee

Lip sync and avatars

Sources

Read on 2026-08-14. A source that has changed since then will not be reflected here until the next pass.