Corporate training videos are often ignored or not paid attention to by most people — especially when they are compulsory. A recent survey from Kaltura, the video tech provider, revealed that 75% of employees confess to skipping through training videos, watching them without sound or listening to them while doing other things.
Therefore, is there a method to make them more interesting and less costly? Dominik Mate Kovacs, the co-founder and CEO of Colossyan, believes there is — and it involves GenAI.
Colossyan uses AI to create workplace learning videos, altering, re-animating and editing footage of one of several virtual avatars with different backgrounds. Users can input a script to have it “spoken” by Colossyan’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine, which also translates the script into over 70 languages.
Image Credits: Colossyan
Kovacs told TechCrunch in an email interview that “Colossyan’s AI video platform lets you generate a video by inputting a script and choosing from a varied selection of avatars.” He added that “Any company can efficiently create a video on almost any topic, without requiring traditional filming resources.”
Kovacs started Colossyan in 2020 after leaving Defudger, a deepfakes detection platform, which he co-founded. As an engineer and data scientist, Kovacs says that he was motivated to start Colossyan by the growing corporate interest in GenAI.
“Enterprises are using AI in various areas such as IT automation, customer care and digital labor — showing the wide applicability and potential impact of AI technologies in improving operations and service delivery,” Kovacs said. “The obstacles to AI adoption, such as limited AI skills and data complexity, are important but manageable challenges that many organizations are actively trying to overcome. ”
Just for fun, I tried Colossyan’s platform, which has a free trial, to see if I could make a training video that’d keep my ADHD brain interested — which is a tough challenge. The avatars were too rigid and unrealistic for my taste and the TTS engine too mechanical, especially compared to some of the more advanced GenAI tools out there (e.g. ElevenLabs). But I’ve definitely seen worse corporate videos.
Colossyan’s video generation speed is slower than I’d anticipate — a 38-second clip takes ~11 minutes. Of course, that’s still much faster than making trainings from scratch. But honestly, if I had to generate more than a few videos for any reason, I’d be inclined to use PowerPoint or Canva instead.
I’m not Colossyan’s ideal customer, obviously. And it seems that several well-known brands are willing to pay for a subscription to Colossyan as it is now, including Novartis, Porsche, Vodafone, HPE and Paramount, says Kovacs.
Kovacs explains the customer attraction by features like integrations with learning management systems and a “conversation mode’ that lets two avatars have a dialogue with each other. He doesn’t dispute that there’s a lot of competition in the GenAI video space — see CommonGround, Synthesia and Surge plus solutions from tech giants like Microsoft — but he believes that Colossyan’s focus on “interactivity and engagement,” as he calls it, will keep the platform ahead.
Maybe he’s right. Colossyan today announced that it raised $22 million in a funding round led by Lakestar with participation from Launchub, Day One Capital and Emerge Education. The funds will be used to triple Colossyan’s headcount across its New York, London and Budapest offices, Kovacs says, and develop new capabilities like branching videos and knowledge checks.
“For C-suite and IT department leaders, our platform offers a scalable, cost-effective solution to training and development challenges,” he said.