I Recorded Myself for Years. Synthesia Made Me Question Why.

I run a training video library for a mid-size company — onboarding, compliance, software walkthroughs. The old pipeline was me, a mic, and Descript. The question this month was whether Synthesia should replace me on camera, and the answer turned out to be uncomfortable.

Descript is the best editing experience I've used, full stop. Editing video by editing the transcript is the kind of idea that ruins every other editor for you. Filler word removal alone gives me back an hour per video. What it doesn't do is create anything — I still have to show up, articulate, and not blink weirdly.

Synthesia removed the showing-up part. The compliance updates — the videos that are 90% identical every quarter — now come from a template with an avatar reading the new text. Nobody has complained. That's the damning part: for dry material, the audience literally cannot tell or doesn't care.

What stayed human: anything with personality. Product announcements, anything where tone matters — the avatar's flat delivery reads as corporate in the bad way. So my stack now has a split I didn't plan: Synthesia for the mandatory stuff, Descript for the stuff people actually watch. My face is on camera 60% less and my calendar is better for it.