Windsor Review: Can Its AI Videos Pass As Real? [2024]

Windsor at a Glance

Windsor’s AI Can Help You Craft Personalized Video Messages

Windsor is unique in that it’s not really an AI video creator – it functions more like a video personalization tool. It can replicate your voice and insert your recipient’s names in a personalized message. It’s a robust tool that adds a touch of authenticity to otherwise generic messages, such as showing gratitude with a thank you email.

Windsor caters to businesses looking to strengthen customer relationships through personalized messaging. You’ll benefit the most if you’re already using advanced marketing automation systems. As a small business, you can also use the tool to send customized videos manually.

This tool does one thing, but it does it well. The platform’s interface is easy to navigate, and connecting with popular customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing platforms is straightforward. The fact that Windsor’s team checks each video’s quality shows a level of commitment to the product that we don’t often see in the AI industry. The high price tag might scare smaller teams away, but there’s a lot of potential here.

Read on to find out if Windsor is the right AI tool for your business.

A Niche Tool With Specific Use Cases

Windsor can’t craft videos from scratch. Its AI alters a specific section of your video to directly address your recipient. If you’re camera shy and don’t want to appear in the video, one of Windsor’s professional actors can help – for a price. There are enough templates to experiment with, even if you don’t plan to set up your avatar right away.

Although the tool’s scope is limited, that’s not necessarily bad – the output quality is usually good. Mind you, it’s not perfect. Someone paying close attention will be able to tell that the video has been digitally altered.

Video Templates

All Windsor plans (including the free one) come with 16 ready-made videos that you can use to sample the tool’s capabilities. These templates include order and post-purchase thank you videos, surveys, abandoned cart reminders, and more.

I wouldn’t recommend using them in your campaigns as they are, but they’re actually rather good for inspiration. After setting up my avatar, I replicated a few of these and added my own spin – which I think worked out okay (though I’m probably somewhat biased). I used my own scripts and tailored the message to my audience, which is how Windsor is meant to be used.

Custom Avatar

To create your own avatar, you need to a) give Windsor consent to process your data and b) record yourself reading a random script on camera for about 15 minutes. Depending on the quality of the original footage and how many templates you want to create, it might take a day or two for the team to process your request.

I liked how involved Windsor was in the process. Of course, the AI did most of the work, but Windsor’s experts made adjustments to ensure my avatar was as optimized as possible. The Windsor team will quickly let you know whether any templates need a retake and offer suggestions on how to shoot better videos that result in more accurate AI avatars.

Quality Assurance

Each digital alteration is short and usually appears early in the video. If you record a thank you template, you’ll start by saying “Hello, watermelon” and continue with the rest of your message. Since AI is effectively only replacing a single word, the Windsor team can double-check every video for quality before it leaves the platform. And that’s exactly what happens.

This feature alone is enough to set Windsor apart as that’s not the industry standard with AI video tools. Getting your videos might take a bit longer, but it’s worth the wait. Many things can go wrong: the AI mispronounces a long name or generates a weird lip/facial movement. If a video doesn’t work, Windsor won’t ship it.

Campaign Analytics

Once your campaign is live, you can access it from the main dashboard and view your campaign analytics. Windsor will let you know the percentage of recipients who viewed the video, the average call to action (CTA) click rate, and the number of videos skipped during quality control. Note that you won’t be billed for rejected videos.

There’s also a useful viewer retention chart that shows what percentage of your video recipients watch. All these stats are handy for measuring performance and understanding whether your approach is generating enough engagement.

I Had No Issues Navigating the Platform

Windsor is an AI video tool that zeroes in on personalization. The premise is simple, and so are its tools. The first time I logged in, I was pleasantly surprised by the clutter-free interface – the main menu has just 5 tabs. Windsor’s team has streamlined the video personalization process, so you’ll know exactly where to go and what to do when you sign up.

Getting Started With Windsor

To see whether Windsor’s AI-personalized videos work for you, click Get Started on the Windsor homepage to sign up for a new account. From the Campaigns tab on the main dashboard, click the Create Campaign button in the top right corner. An overview will pop up to help you understand how the tool works.

Enter your campaign name and add your contacts. You can do this manually or batch names and email addresses into a CSV file for upload. Alternatively, you can connect Windsor to your preferred marketing platform like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and HubSpot.

Next, select a video template that’s already premade with a custom actor (aka avatar). Creating your own avatar and personalized videos costs extra, but you can preview the AI’s capabilities for free. Send a couple of videos to yourself to test out different names and see what the AI can do.

Note that each time you add a new recipient, it can take up to 24 hours for the team to process your request. That’s because every video is manually checked, and foreign names can pose new challenges. In my case, most videos were ready within a few hours.

If you’re happy with the result, you can purchase a package and begin setting up your own avatar and personalized videos.

Detailed Avatar Setup Guide

Getting your avatar right is crucial to creating personalized videos that look and sound as natural as possible. This is the only challenging aspect of using Windsor, which is why there’s a super detailed guide on how to record yourself.

It’s a four-step video mini-course explaining the ideal lighting and camera angles, distance from the camera, picture quality, and sound. The better the footage, the higher the chances of properly training the AI to deliver great results. You can easily access this guide via the Documentation tab on the main menu.

If you’re still worried about the overall quality of your avatar, you can book a free session with Windsor’s recording experts. They’ll help you record the footage and even work on specific templates you can use to send videos to customers right away.

Script Examples

After you’ve created your avatar, consider what your templates will include. I used the ready-made ones as inspiration to create my own, but I also found some great script examples by real businesses in the recording guide. You get a detailed view of the AI-assisted greeting, the rest of the message, and the final CTA.

There aren’t too many of these available yet (users need to allow Windsor to share their messages publicly), but new ones are added daily.

Quick Script Recording

It makes sense to create your own avatar and templates as soon as possible. That said, I appreciate that Windsor allows you to hire its own actors to record videos for you. Perhaps you don’t have the necessary recording equipment but want to begin sending personalized messages ASAP. Maybe, like me, the custom avatar price is holding you back, and you want to see what the AI can do before you commit.

Whatever the reason, you can easily request a template from the main dashboard – all you need is to choose an actor and upload your script for them to read on camera. Currently, there are 8 actors to choose from, with more promised in the near future.

The AI Does Its Job but It’s Not Perfect

I created videos using both premade actor templates and my custom avatar. I tried several names, from simple ones like Josh and Emily to less common ones like Coinneach, Martijn, and Alexandros.

You Might Think the Video Is Real If You’re Not Paying Attention

Once you have your avatar and templates set up, creating new campaigns and sending personalized videos to your customers is easy. But based on the difficulty of the name, it can take up to 24 hours for the team to process a specific video. The team will reject your request if a video looks or sounds way off.

Note that Windsor’s current iteration can’t create AI videos from scratch. You need a “template” video as your base, and AI alters a single word – currently only the customer’s first name. Only a few frames and a second of audio are digitally altered by AI.

Here’s a template I used to set up personalized videos thanking customers for purchasing Wildlife Sanctuary Project T-shirts and aiding our cause:

And here’s a template I used to recover lost sales by reminding customers they still have merchandise sitting in their carts:

The quality and “realness” varies from video to video. I found that common, one-syllable names like John and Kate work great. Mouth movements match the spoken sound, and the voice sounds natural and is consistent with the rest of the video. If you look very closely, you might be able to tell something’s up, but it’s not easy. That’s because the AI trained on data that included these names in the first place.

What about less common names? Well, processing them takes longer, which might be an issue if you’ve set up complex automated email campaigns. They can work, provided recipients don’t pay too much attention to your mouth. The sound is okay, but lip movements can be off sometimes. The good thing is that Windsor won’t ever send a video that has completely missed the mark.

The technology is improving, and it’ll only get better with time. But it’s something to remember if you’re planning to use Windsor to send videos to an international audience with all kinds of long and uncommon (to us) names.

Expensive but Free To Try

Windsor is expensive. At times, it seems too expensive, considering you’ll have to pay extra to unlock the platform’s core feature: a custom avatar that looks and sounds just like you. That’s right. Your base plan includes only the number of generated videos.

This is problematic as it creates a barrier to entry that other competitors don’t have. Let’s say you want to send 100 monthly videos to your subscribers using your own avatar and video templates. You’d have to pay $49 per month for your plan and an extra one-off payment for the avatar that costs hundreds of dollars.

All paid plans unlock access to premium integrations with popular e-commerce and marketing platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, and Mailchimp. You’ll also be able to remove Windsor branding and host your videos on your own subdomain. If you create at least 5,000 monthly videos (which goes for $599/month), you’ll get a customer success manager and a dedicated Slack Channel to chat with the Windsor team.

The good news is that Windsor has a free plan that lets you create and send up to 50 videos using one of the ready-made templates. That’s enough to get a good idea of the AI’s capabilities and determine whether or not it’ll work for you.

Windsor’s output is usually good, and paying a bit more for more realistic AI videos is worth it. That said, the cost to create your first avatar is exorbitant. It would make sense to incorporate it into the base package and charge extra for any additional avatars created beyond that.

Not As Fast and Reliable As I Would Like

Besides the scheduled avatar setup sessions, you can contact Windsor’s team via email and phone support through its website. Clients paying for at least 5,000 monthly videos can also contact the team via a dedicated Slack Channel.

It’s good that Windsor features plenty of guides and is generally straightforward because its support team isn’t the quickest. Although I didn’t require much assistance, I can see how this could be problematic (e.g., you’re having payment issues).

I emailed support on a Sunday afternoon to ask whether it was possible to personalize something other than my recipients’ first names. A representative got back to me more than 28 hours later:

Ankit revealed that new variables are on the way, which means more opportunities for personalization. They were friendly and to the point and even offered me a place in the beta program.

Unfortunately, Windsor’s online phone support doesn’t really work as intended. Once you press the Talk Now button, the website attempts to connect you with an agent, but nothing seems to happen. I tried reaching support throughout the day, sometimes waiting over ten minutes on the “connecting” screen. Nothing. There’s also no live chat feature, and you can’t request a callback.

If you need immediate assistance and don’t have access to a direct Slack Channel with Windsor’s support, chances are you won’t get help on the same day, which is a shame.