Most people don’t watch corporate training videos — or, in cases where training is mandatory, don’t give them their full attention. According to recent voting from Kaltura, the video technology provider, 75% of employees admit to watching training videos, watching them without sound or listening to them while multitasking.
Well, given the video tutorials they are not cheap to produce, is there a way to make them more attractive and therefore less of a money sink? Dominik Mate Kovacs, its co-founder and CEO Colossianbelieves there is — and it involves genetic artificial intelligence.
Colossyan taps into artificial intelligence to create on-the-job training videos, mixing, retouching and editing footage of one of several virtual avatars in changing backdrops. Users can input a script to have it “read” aloud by Colossyan’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine, which also translates the script into more than 70 languages.
Image Credits: Colossian
“To create a video with Colossyan’s AI video platform, all you have to do is enter a script and choose from a wide range of avatars,” Kovacs told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Any company can effectively create a video for almost anything, without the need for conventional filming resources.”
Kovacs founded Colossyan in 2020 after exiting Defudger, a deepfake detection platform he helped co-launch. An engineer and data scientist by training, Kovacs says he was inspired to start Colossyan by nascent corporate interest in GenAI.
“Businesses are leveraging AI in areas such as IT automation, customer service and digital work – highlighting the broad applicability and potential impact of AI technologies in streamlining operations and improving service delivery,” said Kovacs. “Barriers to AI adoption, such as limited AI skills and data complexity, are significant but insurmountable challenges that many organizations are actively working to overcome.”
For good measure, I gave Colossyan’s platform, which offers a free trial, a chance to see if I could make an instructional video that would successfully get my ADHD brain’s attention—admittedly a high bar. The avatars were a bit too stiff and cartoonish for my taste, and the TTS engine too robotic, at least compared to some of the more sophisticated GenAI tools out there (eg ElevenLabs). But I’ve definitely seen worse corporate videos.
Colossyan also doesn’t generate video as quickly as I’d expect — a 38-second clip takes ~11 minutes. Admittedly, this is much faster than creating workouts from scratch. But honestly, faced with the prospect of creating more than a handful of videos for any purpose, I’d be tempted to go the PowerPoint or Canva route.
I’m not Colossyan’s target market, of course. And it seems many household brands are willing to pay for a subscription to Colossyan as it exists today, including Novartis, Porsche, Vodafone, HPE and Paramount, Kovacs claims.
Kovacs attributes the customer attraction to features such as integrations with learning management systems and a “chat function” that allows two avatars to dialogue with each other. He doesn’t deny there’s a fair bit of competition in the GenAI video space — see CommonGround, Synthesia and Surge plus solutions from tech giants like Microsoft — but he believes Colossyan’s focus on “interactivity and engagement,” as he puts it, will continue to set it apart. the platform.
Maybe he’s right. Colossyan announced today that it has raised $22 million in a funding round led by Lakestar with participation from Launchub, Day One Capital and Emerge Education. The proceeds will go toward tripling Colossyan’s headcount in its New York, London and Budapest offices, Kovacs says, and developing new capabilities like video branching and knowledge checks.
“For C-suite and IT leaders, our platform represents a scalable, cost-effective solution to training and development challenges,” he added.
