It's greatest strength is also its weakness #HasPotential
First, Zync.ai is excellent in that it takes multiple steps of video production and combines them into one automated solution. I used to record my wife's vlog content, edit the footage, and put everything together. This would take time, but with Zync.ai, I can see this streamlining everything.
That said, while this automated approach is great for streamlining, it also hinders the content produced and, in many cases, has made it unusable. This is not to say the product is bad; it needs improvement to cater to various social brands.
Here are the areas that need to be fixed:
1. Everything is one take, then bake (hence the title). This means that whatever you record, there are no second chances - it's done. EG My wife did a recording and made a mistake where you can hear her say and was transcribed, "... Wait What.. oh whoopies... I have to do that again. Well thats a bit, I don't want to do that again." There is no way to mark problem areas not to be processed/avoided.
2. Have a few more options to customise the video experience. My wife is talking to people who are event/marketing professionals on a B2B level. Having lots of beeps, boops, and whoops distracts and takes away from her message, making the tone feel a little less professional. Have options (either tick box or choices) to help refine the output.
3. You cannot change or upload your own music (which we have). Whatever the software chooses is baked into the video. If it's not the right fit, you lose credit.
4. Unable to upload your background image for thumbnails (that said, I was ok with what Zync.ai produced.
5. There is an Audience Description option. Still, I am unsure if it directly impacts the content produced (I suggest having a few options to help refine the user experience). EG Dropdown or a way to put in age, location, and demographic options to ensure the AI knows exactly what you're targeting because all these pops, whoops and sound effects are not aligned with our target audience.
6. Unable to change the background, so if we recorded in an environment like a warehouse, we cannot edit the background/blur it or even preset to something generic from the beginning.
7. While we speak English, as Australians, we speak English that aligns much closer with UK English (I'm happy to have UK English as an option).
Branding options are severely limited:
* Right now, you can advise a primary and secondary colour, which is fine, but it would be nice to have 3rd accent colour.
* No way to change fonts that reflect your brand. I would suggest allowing Google Fonts to help align with your brand.
* Logo options cause issues. If you upload your logo, in this case, ours, which is hot pink and white but also one of your brand colours, your logo gets blended out. Have the option to have alternative logos EG White/Black variants and so on).
* Reading the text with a webcam on the top of your desktop can give the impression that you're reading off a script to the side. Have an option to place the text on the top of the browser (or at least placement options).
What options I would like to see are:
The ability to have longer videos (these could use more tokens or be another tier), e.g., 10-minute YouTube video content. This will make it more versatile.
As stated in the beginning, Zync.ai has a lot of potential. But, it needs further refinement and options to align closer with a brand's overall branding/style and voice. So, I am not ruling it out, but I hope in the coming months, Zync further develops.
arjunzync
Nov 4, 2024Thanks for the detailed review.
Glad to know this resonated with your wife's use case.
1. You can do retakes in Zync. In fact, our upcoming release of the Segmented Recording + Zync Prompter solves for that significantly. Here's more on that: https://www.zync.ai/lessons/navigating-the-recording-studio
2. Yes, we are coming up with more themes and you should be able to pick a motion design system and themes. We will take your feedback into place and create a theme that doesn't have too many sound effects. That said, I'm in enough B2B circles to say things are moving more in the beep/boop direction there too.
3. Yeah, we have an option for you to turn off the background music entirely. We will have more options to upload music in the future. If you feel like you lost a credit I'm happy to reset it for you.
4. We hear this. We make the whole thing less customizable because most people end up spending hours in trying to perfect things and never publish. We want it so Zync can deliver most of the functionality with minimal fixing.
5. Audience description is not used for detecting the video effects we should add. It typically caters the video script to suit that audience.
6. Background blur / virtual background is in our roadmap. Feel free to upvote it here: https://feedback.zync.ai/roadmap
7. We do have English En-AU as an option. We shipped this change late last week and you might have set your language before that.
Branding options:
I'm not sure I see the use case for 3rd accent color.
Fonts change is on our backlog.
You're open to upload any logo. We place the logo on top of the primary color when possible so it's best to choose a primary color / logo that don't clash with each other. Once done this works really well across all our assets.
"Feels like reading a script". This is addressed in a unique way with our latest release here: https://www.zync.ai/lessons/navigating-the-recording-studio
Longer videos is much requested. We've made this specifically for short form content but might consider this in a higher priced tier in the future.
Thanks for your review. We hope to bring you a product that you love.
We'd really appreciate if you could change your review to a 5* after reviewing these 2 releases coming this week:
https://www.zync.ai/lessons/navigating-the-recording-studio
https://www.zync.ai/lessons/editing-videos-with-zyncs-video-editor