There is a new Record button accessible from Drive view. This will open a project with the recorder open, or take you to Rooms when you select Record with others. We added this to make it easier to find our recording capabilities and give users an even faster way to get started.

We’re reposting this from version 109 as we have ramped this change up to 100% of users. A few of the details have also changed so it is worth taking a quick review:

The "Publish" button has been renamed to Export and the selection panel has been rearranged. All of the available options work as they did before but the names are slightly different, for reference:

We unfortunately had to remove the Import from YouTube option due to changes on Google's end. We are not yet sure if we will be able to bring this feature back but we will keep you updated when we know more.

Here are the updates we made to collaborative recording with Rooms in v110.

We will soon require all users to verify their email address in order to continue using Descript. This should not effect as vast majority of users, who have already verified their email address. However, if you have not yet verified, you’ll receive a banner warning asking you to verify your email address. Please do so a quickly as possible to prevent any interruption when we do eventually enforce this requirement.

Many users have already been moved to an upgraded version of the Desktop application. This newer version provides a host of benefits that improve performance and playback speed. It also completely eliminates the need to store project files locally.

When the upgraded version is downloaded, any files that haven’t finished uploading will be stored for you in a local folder so you can retrieve them as needed.

It's been a big month here at Descript. Check out all of the "exciting" updates we made in February in this video roundup hosted by the Descript Changelog:

Welcome to Descript Season 8 - which is focused on features that make you look good by default. In our last update, we announced our overhaul of our Templates library, now known as Layouts. The new Layout pack library has freshly redesigned layouts for you to choose from.

Join Descript's Head of Brand Vanessa for a deep dive into our new Layout packs.

You can click here for a playlist showing off all of the new layouts.

Seeing it is one thing, but why not try it for yourself?

To make this all easier to find and understand, we’ve also renamed the Canvas section to Scene editor. While the term Canvas may be somewhat common to video editing - we’re asking you once again to rewire your brain a tiny bit: Scenes are like different sets in a play, and the Scene editor is where you build the scaffolding.

And tying all of these changes together, we’ve added a new Layout picker to make it easier to preview layouts before adding them into your project. This can be accessed from the Scene panel, from the Scene editor toolbar, or from the Script toolbar.

Each of our new Layouts includes our new Smart transitions, which detect all the layers that change between scenes in a project, and automatically adds transitions for each one as it moves into the next layout. This can include fades, zooms, and other animations for a 1-click layer of professional polish.

Join us for a live demo with CEO Andrew Mason on March 11th, 2025. He’ll be showing off the new layouts, smart transitions, and taking your questions. Register here.

This patch fixes issues in our backend system and will not result in any user facing changes.

Descript Version 109 features two important changes to terminology that coincide with polish we've added since launching our new Layout picker in the last update. Here's what you need to know:

We’ve renamed the main visual editing space in Descript from “Canvas” to Scene editor. This relabeling is to help illustrate the relationship between:

While the term Canvas may be somewhat common in video editing — we’re asking you once again to rewire your brain a tiny bit: Scenes are like different sets in a play, and the Scene editor is where you stage them up.

Only the wording has changed, this will not effect any existing workflows but it’s an important change to be aware of for navigating the app.

Some users will notice that the "Publish" button has been renamed to Export and the selection panel has been rearranged. All of the available options work as they did before but the names are slightly different, for reference:

This change will be rolling out slowly. As of now, 50% of users will see the new button, and increase over the next few weeks. If you’re not seeing it just yet, keep any eye out.

We’ve made some big changes to working with Scenes and adding Layouts. First, you’ll notice that the term “template” has been replaced with the term Layout pack. A Layout pack contains individual layouts which are organized by Scene-type (i.e. Title, Lower Third, 3-camera etc.)

As a refresher, Scenes are divisions in your timeline that represent changes to your visual layout.

We’ll preselect a default layout pack, but you can click Change layout pack to visit the Gallery, view your Private custom layout packs, or view packs available from your Drive. Each layout has a number of different styles that you can view by hovering over the Layout card and clicking See More.

There’s a handy search bar, and we pre-filter your layouts to only show layouts that match the amount of layers in your composition (i.e. If you only have 1 camera file, we won’t show multicam layouts unless you toggle off the filter.)

The 3-dot menu on this panel these options:

If you don’t see them right away, you will by the time version 109 is released.

We’ve added a new Scene toolbar under the Canvas anytime a scene is selected. You can use it to swap layouts on the fly, adjust transitions, or add backgrounds to your scene. This toolbar also shows the current layout-type for easy reference

If you’re having deja vu, this was announced and rolled back a few months ago.

There is also an option to Add scene from the Script toolbar. This will take you straight into the new Layout picker panel so you can quickly build your project from scratch before you’ve added any content or quickly apply layouts to you script by highlighting each scene-to-be.

We’ve refreshed our collection of premade Layout packs (FKA templates,) adding newly designed packs, redesigned packs, and removing some layout packs that simply won’t be missed.

Here are some of the new packs, which sound tasty and look great:

You can locate the gallery by clicking "Change layout pack" from the scene panel.

With all the updates to working with Scenes and Layouts, we’ve added a new type of Transition animation that was created to save you mountains of time. Smart transitions apply automatically to all visual layers in a scene, and select appropriate crossfades, zooms, wipes etc. to the Scene transition. This transition effect comes applied automatically to some of our default layout packs, or you can add it manually from the Scene panel on the sidebar.

You can now create translated dubbing and captions for Chinese (Mandarin,) Japanese, and Korean. These are in the same list along side our existing translation options. These languages also feature native sounding speakers for Business and Enterprise plans.

Eye contact - our tool that draws the speakers eyes to the camera at all times - is now out of Beta. This just means that we’ve observed the number of bugs and other errors to be low enough that the feature is considered stable. As an added benefit, this effect now processes instantly when using the Web or upgraded Desktop version of Descript.

Business an Enterprise users will be getting an improved training model when generating AI speakers. This updated and improved model creates more natural sounding custom AI speakers. Any existing voices will be retrained using the new speaker model so the benefits are back-ported.

For Enterprise users:

On February 11th, our custom AI speakers are getting a major upgrade that will deliver voices with more natural speech with better intonation and pacing*.

These upgrades also bring faster text-to-speech generation, and add support for custom AI speakers in 19 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish.

You can hear a before and after sample below. This voice was trained first on our old model, and then retrained with the upgraded model. Have a listen:

If you prefer to opt out you can let us know by submitting a ticket to our support team.

*Please note that these upgrades will apply to Text to Speech - not Regenerate.