Hedra

Hedra generates character performance video: you give it a character image and an audio track, and it returns a clip of that character speaking the audio with matched lip movement, facial expression, head motion and — on the newer models — body and camera movement. The company's own framing is "omnimodal," meaning the Character model reasons over image, text and audio together rather than bolting a lip-sync pass onto a still frame. That distinction shows up in the output: emphasis, pauses and emotional register in the audio drive the performance, instead of the mouth animating while the rest of the face sits frozen.

It's built for people who need a talking character rather than a talking employee. Hedra Studio bundles character image generation, a voice library and text-to-speech, and the video model into one timeline, so a solo creator can go from a text prompt to a finished clip without sourcing a presenter, a voice actor or a camera. That puts it in a different lane from Synthesia and HeyGen, which are optimised for corporate presenters, brand-safe stock avatars and enterprise governance. Hedra is looser and more expressive — stylised characters, animals, illustrations and non-photoreal designs are first-class inputs, not workarounds.

There's also a developer API, and Hedra's models are exposed through third-party inference hosts, which matters if you're generating at volume or wiring character video into a product rather than clicking through a studio UI. Hedra raised a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2025, and the release cadence on the Character line has been fast since — worth checking which model version your account defaults to, because output quality between generations is not subtle.