Turn any text into a narrated video lecture

It is a narrated lecture built from new scenes, not a recording of your text: a natural voice explains the material while diagrams, charts, equations, and step-by-step builds animate in sync, and the AI can add generated pictures where they help. The video is 16:9 (Short is vertical), split into chapters, with captions you can switch on, a searchable transcript, optional question checkpoints, and AI chat. Standard is the default style; Illustrated, Short, Manim Math Animation, and Freestyle are the other modes.

Yes, to start. The Free plan includes one lifetime AI Creation Credit, shared across every Scholarly tool, and it can make one narrated text video of about 2 minutes at 720p with Scholarly branding, with no credit card. One source goes into each free video. Watching and sharing by link are free; MP4 download, 1080p, a custom length up to 45 minutes, and 15 AI Creation Credits a week come with Premium.

A 2-minute video usually takes about 8 to 20 minutes to generate, and longer lectures take longer: about 18 to 40 minutes for a 10-minute video and about 55 to 95 minutes for 45 minutes. It runs on Scholarly's servers, so you can close the tab and come back to the finished video.

Any educational or work text works well: lecture notes, textbook excerpts, study guides, articles, SOPs, or your own summaries. Longer, more detailed text gives the AI more material to build scenes from, while the video length comes from your plan and the target you set.

Synthesia, Pictory, and similar tools are built for marketing and business videos. Scholarly is built for education. Your videos include chapter navigation, searchable transcripts, AI chat, and one-click flashcard generation — study features that marketing tools don't offer.

Yes. After your video is generated, you can create flashcards from the content with one click and study them with spaced repetition. Exporting to Anki or PDF, downloading, and printing require a paid plan.

Yes, on any paid plan. For group study, anyone you send the link to can watch in the browser. Premium and Laureate download the finished lecture as an MP4, and turning the Scholarly logo off when you generate gives a watermark-free file; the export pack adds the companion slides PDF (Standard mode), the script, and caption files. On the Free plan you watch the video in Scholarly and share it with a view link that opens in the browser, but download is not included.

Narration, captions, and the transcript can be generated in 70+ output languages and regional variants, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese. The pasted text and the video do not have to share a language, so English text can become a Spanish or Japanese video. Arabic and Hebrew lectures are laid out right to left, and on-screen text follows the lecture's language.

You can't edit individual scenes, but you can regenerate the video with modified text. The chapter navigation and transcript let you quickly find and review any section without scrubbing through the full video.

Watermark-free output requires a paid plan. The Free plan includes one shared lifetime AI Creation Credit across Scholarly; it does not reset and can generate a roughly 2-minute video at 720p. You can view and share the result in Scholarly. Paid plans include 1080p, custom target length, watermark-free output, and MP4 download.

Yes. Typed notes can be pasted straight into the text box; note files can be uploaded as PDF or Word documents; handwritten notes work if you photograph or scan them to PDF first. Scholarly also has a dedicated notes to video workflow built for exactly this — it produces the same narrated, chaptered lecture from messy class notes.

Both work. You can type a topic prompt like "explain the Krebs cycle for a biochemistry exam" and the AI builds the lecture itself. But when you have real course material, paste it — a source-grounded video sticks to your professor's terminology, scope, and emphasis instead of producing a generic overview.

When speed matters more than depth. Rereading a short summary is faster than watching it; finding one fact is faster with AI chat or search; problem-heavy courses reward practice questions over watching explanations. Convert text to video when the material is long, dense, or unfamiliar — that's where narrated visual explanation pays off.

Yes. Upload a standard operating procedure, onboarding guide, process doc, or policy PDF — up to 10 files in one video (20 on Laureate) — and Scholarly writes a teaching script only from that material, then generates a narrated video with chapters, captions, and a full transcript. Because the script comes from your document rather than the open internet, it uses your steps and your terminology. Review it before rolling it out, as with anything AI-generated.

Yes. Text-based files produce the best results, and PDFs, Word documents, and slide decks all work. You can combine up to 10 files into one video (20 on Laureate) — for example an SOP plus the policy behind it — and when the document changes you update it and generate a fresh video in minutes instead of re-recording. The uploaded material stays in your workspace, so teammates can also chat with it and get cited answers.

Yes. Every video can be shared with a link and watched in the browser with chapters, captions, and a transcript, and paid plans can download a watermark-free MP4 to host in your wiki or anywhere else. Scholarly for Teams adds shared source libraries so everyone builds from the same approved material, invitations by email or link with Member and Admin roles, per-member activity, and one central bill for the seats you choose on Premium for Teams or Laureate for Teams; the team plan unlocks its formats and AI limits for every seat.

Yes. Paste the article, essay, or any block of text straight into the text box. Scholarly writes a teaching script from that text only, then renders animated scenes with narration, chapter navigation, captions, and a full transcript. On the Free plan the result is a 2-minute video at 720p; Premium sets a custom target length up to 45 minutes at 1080p, and a long essay gets more chapters rather than a rushed pace.

On the Free plan, a video lecture is a fixed length of about 2 minutes. On Premium and Laureate you set a target length up to 45 minutes before generating (15 minutes is the default), and the lecture is planned to that length. You also pick the narrator voice for your output language, or let Scholarly choose. Each video costs 1 AI Creation Credit with the default model, plus 1 extra credit above 15 minutes and 2 extra above 30 minutes. The vertical Short format keeps its own fixed length.