Nvidia-backed AI startup Synthesia now lets you make multilingual video presentations using just your phone or webcam

Synthesia, a British artificial intelligence startup, on Monday showed off a slew of new product updates including the ability to create your own Apple-style key presentations with AI avatars by using just a laptop webcam or your phone.

The seven-year-old firm, which is backed by Nvidia, said the new product updates will make it more of an all-encompassing video production suite for large companies, rather than just a platform that offers users the ability to create AI-generated avatars.

Among the new updates Synthesia is launching is the ability to produce AI avatars using webcams or a phone, "full body" avatars with hands and arms, and a screen recording tool that shows an AI avatar guiding you through what you're watching.

Synthesia, which says it's used by nearly half of the Fortfune 500, uses AI avatars for all kinds of purposes.

These can range from creating tailored training videos to guide employees around certain processes, or generating promotional material that can be shown in the form of a video rather than an email or other textual communications.

But that hasn't always been the case. According to co-founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli, in the first three years of the company's story, Synthesia actually started out trying to sell its technology to Hollywood agencies and big-budget video production companies. The firm used computer vision for an AI dubbing tool that made mouth movements more lifelike for different languages.

"What we figured out was that the quality threshold to do anything with these guys was so big, no matter what we do, we'll be a very small part of a much bigger process," Riparbelli told CNBC in an interview at the firm's London office.

"What was more interesting was the democratization aspect of: