![\"\"](\"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/How-to-AI_image-1024x538.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nTL;DR<\/p>\n
– Mailtrap’s content team needed video at volume, but not the overhead of a full production process for every clip. AI avatars solved the constraint.<\/p>\n
– The stack matters more than any single tool: HeyGen for avatar video at scale, Veed.io when a clip needs heavier editing, Creatify for social formats.<\/p>\n
– Setup is a one-time cost: pick a plan, create an avatar and voice, lock in your brand system, invite the team. After that, a standard talking-head video takes 15\u201340 minutes.<\/p>\n
– A custom brand avatar needs ~3 minutes of properly filmed footage (4K\/60fps, good lighting, front and side angles) plus a separate audio recording for the voice clone.<\/p>\n
– Three formats that worked: a fictional character (Liam) for dry technical topics; the brand avatar for reacting to breaking new and product updates.<\/p>\n
– Budget roughly $120\u2013150\/month on HeyGen Business, ~$20 per extra seat.<\/p>\n
– AI doesn’t write the script or supply the idea. It removes the production schedule that used to kill good ideas before they existed.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n\n\n
What is Mailtrap?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Mailtrap<\/a> is an email delivery platform built for product companies with high sending volumes. Teams use it to test emails safely before they reach real users, send transactional email over API or SMTP, run campaigns, and monitor deliverability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Which means our audience is wide: developers, ops, marketers, founders. Serious product teams who still, thankfully, appreciate content that isn’t dull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we needed videos. But we needed videos that a small team could produce quickly, repeatedly, without turning every clip into a production. That constraint is the entire reason AI avatars entered the process. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Comparing 2025 against 2024, after the workflow was in place:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve been experimenting with AI avatars since 2024, and after enough testing, we stopped looking for the video tool. The better approach turned out to be building a small stack where each tool does one thing well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our setup looks like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within HeyGen, we have a few particularly interesting features:<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, a deliverability tutorial could branch into automatic and manual testing, letting viewers jump straight to the approach they care about. If your audience isn\u2019t one clearly defined persona, this could make the same video much more relevant to different viewers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are plenty of other AI features for cleaning up audio, generating videos or images, and turning presentations into videos. They\u2019re useful, but they\u2019re not a big part of this particular workflow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It took me 5\u20136 hours to figure this out in 2024, with no instructions and no idea what I was doing. You have instructions now, so you’ll be faster. Five steps:<\/p>\n\n\n\n HeyGen has plans for individual creators and teams, so I\u2019d start small. The free plan is enough to test the basics and see whether AI avatars actually fit your workflow. Once you know you\u2019ll use it regularly, you can move to a paid plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For our team, Business turned out to be the sweet spot. It gives us the collaboration and brand features we need without going all the way to Enterprise. And when we need another seat, we can simply add one instead of upgrading the entire plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re deciding between plans, I\u2019d focus less on the feature count and more on two questions: how many people will use it, and how much of your production do you want to run through it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you\u2019re in, the next step is choosing an avatar. You have two main options:<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Mailtrap, we\u2019ve used both, and I\u2019ll show you examples of each later in this article. If you\u2019re just getting started, you can choose both options and start experimenting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same principle applies to voices. For a brand avatar, you can clone the person\u2019s voice. Otherwise, choose one from HeyGen\u2019s library and filter it by language, accent, and other characteristics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before you start producing at scale, set up the things you want every video to have in common: intros, outros, colors, templates, illustrations, and other recurring elements. The more you standardize upfront, the fewer decisions you have to make every time you create a new video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re on a team plan, invite your collaborators so drafts, comments, and assets live in a shared workspace instead of somebody’s downloads folder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s pretty much it. Once these basics are in place, you can move from setting up HeyGen to actually producing videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want a brand avatar that actually looks natural, the quality of the source footage matters more than you might expect. This is the brief I use when someone at Mailtrap is creating an avatar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before anything else, make sure the person creating the avatar is involved in the process. HeyGen requires the person being turned into an avatar to upload their own footage and provide consent. The same applies to voice cloning, you can\u2019t do this on someone else\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So treat this as part of the commitment: creating a good avatar requires a little time from the person who will represent the brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll need around 3 minutes of video, with 2 minutes as the minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the first ~40 seconds, stay relatively still and speak naturally. After that, move and gesture as you normally would: use your hands, change your facial expressions, and don\u2019t try to look \u201cperfect.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the best quality:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then do a second recording with the same technical settings, but this time move around. Walk through an office, down a street, around your home. Anywhere that gives you natural movement and a different environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mix up the formats and locations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, record the voice on its own, without video. Use a good microphone, speak naturally, and export the recording as an MP3. This recording is what HeyGen uses for the voice clone. It doesn\u2019t simply take the audio from your avatar footage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once your avatar and basic setup are ready, creating a video is actually super straightforward. This is the workflow we use at Mailtrap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now the one tip: don’t paste your whole script into a single scene. It won’t go well. Break it up so each paragraph becomes its own scene. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Liam isn’t a real person. He’s a character we built, with a voice chosen specifically for him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His job is simple: talk about things that aren\u2019t exactly natural entertainment. Email infrastructure. SMTP servers. Deliverability. The kind of topics people need to understand but rarely get excited about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Instead of presenting another piece of information, we gave that information a character. As a result, Liam\u2019s videos generated 400,000+ views across channels that had previously struggled to get traction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, delivery can completely change how people experience dry subject matter. And AI avatars make it cheap enough to test different characters, formats, and approaches without committing to a full production setup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Cloudflare went down last November, we decided to react while the story was still unfolding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We quickly put together a video explaining what the outage could mean for emails and what teams could do about it, generated it with our brand avatar, and published it in about 20 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was no person to schedule, camera to set up, or room to book. We could go from the idea to a finished video without starting a production process from scratch. Without that setup, this probably wouldn\u2019t have been a late video. It would have been no video at all: another reactive idea dropped because the moment would pass before we could produce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We also use our brand avatar, Marcos, for product update videos. The format stays the same, we just swap in a new script for each release. That makes product videos quick to produce and removes the usual question of whether a small update is worth the effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also gives us an easy way to scale the same announcement across different markets, we can adapt the script and language without having to organize a new recording every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Producing video can be genuinely unpleasant, especially when your social channels want it constantly. AI avatars don’t remove the work, yet they do remove the overhead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI isn’t a miracle here. You still write the scripts. You still need taste, humor, and a point. What changes is that a good idea no longer has to survive a production schedule to exist. And that turns out to matter across pretty much every function, not just marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once your brand system and avatars are set up, 15 to 40 minutes end to end for a standard talking-head video. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n No. The public avatar library covers business and UGC styles and is good enough to test the whole workflow. Custom brand avatars need the Business plan and around three minutes of properly filmed footage, so start with a library avatar and film yours in parallel.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Only with their direct participation. They have to upload their own footage and give consent themselves, and the same goes for voice cloning.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n It depends on the flow you choose, but roughly $120\u2013150 per month on HeyGen’s Business plan, plus about $20 per additional seat. Annual billing is cheaper.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n For product updates, explainers, presentation narration, and reactive commentary \u2014 yes, it’s been good enough for us at Mailtrap. And it’s not only useful to marketers; ops and sales teams get the same benefit.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Synthesia is the closest direct comparison for talking-head avatar video. Veed.io is the better choice for heavier editing and creative reels or shorts.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s a lot of advice on how to use AI. Much less on what it actually looks like when you use it at work. At Railsware, we\u2019ve been figuring out the practical part together. Our engineering, marketing, sales, finance, people, and design teams experiment with AI, test new workflows, and share what actually works in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":19330,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[365],"tags":[],"coauthors":["Viktoriia Ivanenko"],"class_list":["post-19329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insights"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\tWhat results did AI avatars actually deliver?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
How to choose tools for video production?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/\u0417\u043d\u0456\u043c\u043e\u043a-\u0435\u043a\u0440\u0430\u043d\u0430-2026-08-28-\u043e-10.20.10-1024x865.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nHow to set up AI avatar video production<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. Choose a plan<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
2. Create your account and your first avatar<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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3. Create or choose a voice<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. Set up your brand system<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. Bring in the team<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to film a custom brand avatar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
1. Start with consent<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/\u0417\u043d\u0456\u043c\u043e\u043a-\u0435\u043a\u0440\u0430\u043d\u0430-2026-08-28-\u043e-10.53.00-1024x578.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n2. Record the main footage<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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3. Record extra footage<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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4. Record the voice separately<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to make your first video from scratch<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Three real cases: how to use AI avatars in video production<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Case \u21161<\/a>: Liam, AI avatar for less exciting topics<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Case \u21162<\/a>: Brand avatar for reacting to industry news<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Case \u21163<\/a>: Brand avatar for sharing product updates<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
So should you do this?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/vik-2_copy_1024-180x180.jpg\")
<\/div>\n\n FAQ<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
How long does it take to make an AI avatar video? <\/h3>
Do I need a custom avatar to start?<\/h3>
Can I make an AI video of a colleague? <\/h3>
What does an AI avatar workflow cost for a team? <\/h3>
Is AI video good enough for customer-facing content? <\/h3>
What are the alternatives to HeyGen? <\/h3>