A few weeks ago, we launched the beta program for our new collaborative recording platform — Rooms. We started by enabling it for everyone who expressed interest through our waitlist, and 25% of all Descript users.

The beta has been a big success - helping us identify issues, introduce optimizations, and get direct feedback from the community. Today, we increased the number of users who have access to the Rooms beta from 25% to 50%. This opens it up to a full half of all Descript users to try

You can confirm whether you have access by clicking the New Project button from Drive view. You’ll see the option to .

You can also access it from within a project by clicking the Record button and selecting .

There’s still time to join the waitlist if you don’t yet have access, but would like to. If you're in the beta, you can leave feedback and ask questions in the #rooms-beta channel on our community Discord.

For those of you who have had a chance to try it, here’s a quick update on the fixes and improvements we’ve made since launch. And this is just the beginning — there’s so much more as we implement our roadmap, fix bugs, and iterate on your feedback.

Translation with dubbing is moving out of beta, and we’re adding a host of improvements to the functionality and workflow to celebrate.

Translated copies of your main Composition will are now viewable within the Editor window rather than in a pop-out panel. We’ve moved the selection dropdown for your translated compositions into the main composition window for easier access and improved clarity.

You are still limited to re-translating sections, or correcting the translation in this view. If you need to edit the main composition, you’ll still need to do that in the original copy, and then re-translate if you made changes since the last time your ran it.

Translation moving out of beta also means that it’s now limited by subscription tier, available at the Creator level and up. Translation with correction is available for Business and Enterprise plans only.

Enterprise drives will soon be automatically opted out of data sharing. This has been a frequently requested feature from Enterprise teams. As of this release, if data sharing is disabled individual team members or admins will have the option to re-enable it.

We’re launching some improvements to the self-checkout flow, which will be available initially to 50% of users as we make sure it offers a better overall experience. Users will be taken to a web browser with an improved interface making it clearer what will change and the associated costs.

Users in this group will also now see that the Subscription panel has been split into two segments:

We’ll slowly ramp this up to all users over the coming weeks.

There’s a new option in settings that allows you to define a default AI speaker in your projects. When you enter Write mode in a blank project, it will use this AI Speaker by default. This is a great time saver if you're starting your projects in Write mode and typically use the same AI voice.

Our support team has completely re-designed the help center for easier navigation, search, and organization. It looks amazing, and you should go check it out .

The re-design includes:

Also be sure to try out our help bot.

You can now apply templates while using Underlord’s Automatic multicam feature. We’ll smartly select individual layouts based on the number of speakers in each scene.

Just select the Automatic style, a frequency of cutaway’s and toggle on the Use Template option.

Underlord will cut to multi-camera layouts during crosstalk and during longer monologues for reaction shots. Use one of our free templates, or build your own custom template complete with your own color scheme, logos, caption styles, and anything else you might need to speed up your workflow.

Once you’ve run Automatic multicam, you can quickly adjust templates using the scene rail, or quickly copy and paste layouts between scenes.

The beta for our brand new collaborative recorder, Rooms, is finally here. Rooms is the culmination of our long term plan to bring the best features of SquadCast into a package you can access directly from Descript. Featuring improvements to recording quality, reliability, and file backups - we’re excited for you to give it a try.

We’ll be onboarding users in waves, but if you’d like to get access as early as possible, you can sign up for the waitlist below. If you signed up prior today, you should be receiving a confirmation email shortly. Once you’re in the Beta, you can find detailed instructions at our Help Center.

Sign up for the waitlist here: https://www.descript.com/rooms

There’s a new toolbar that appears under the Canvas whenever you are within a scene but have no specific layer selected. From this toolbar you can adjust scene parameters on the fly without opening the sidebar by browsing templates and adding layouts, changing background colors, or adding transitions.

The Layout button has a pop-out gallery view for added convenience.

This is rolling out slowly so if you're not seeing it yet it should be enabled for you soon.

Drive admins can now decide whether Editor members can invite new Editor members to their team's Drive. You can find the toggle under the Subscription section of the settings menu. Toggling this to OFF will prevent Editor members from sending those invites until unless an Admin turns it back ON.

That smooth, documentary-style presentation for b-roll and still images is finally here. Put on your PBS hat and add the Ken Burns animation to any visual media for a smooth zoom and pan.

It comes with 8-directional settings and a center zoom option.

A random zoom and pan setting will be selected when you initially apply the effect so you don’t necessarily have to choose them yourself if you just want to quickly spice up your background content.

The zoom/pan can be set to:

The Ken Burns effect has 3 speed settings:

You can now use your AI voices directly in conjunction with the Edit for clarity tool. This is great for times where you’re unable to re-record anything based on the suggestions you receive using Edit for Clarity. Just toggle the option labeled , and check off the speakers you’d like to have eligible for edit-for-clarity based word or phrase replacement.

Any parts of the script that will be replaced will be marked in blue.

Sequences,

You can now add rounding to the corners on the background of your text elements.

Corner rounding helps make your visual layout more distinct, clear and professional. Backgrounds can also help make your text easier to read and rounding provides a cleaner look especially when overlaid against contrasting colors in your background.

You can add rounding using this icon:

In addition, there are two new settings under the background option in the layers menu:

There are a few new features releasing today, and they don't even require you to download an app update. We just turned them on.

We’ve added new text animations and animation settings for Title and other text elements.

There are two new presets:

You can also target most animations by word, by line, or by paragraph.

Easing is applied per word, sentence or paragraph. The overall animation is always on a linear easing curve.

You can now apply borders and shadows to all visual layer types including video.

Borders have their own section in the Layer panel, and Shadows will appear under the Effects header. We are also adding Shadows, toggled off, to all visual layers by default for easy access.

By popular request, we have brought back the zoom and pan preset. Zoom and pan animations could always be performed using a Custom animation, but we’re restored the preset version that already has some level of animation set on the ending keyframe.

Drive admins can now view the AI suite usage data for Drive members.

The Drive admin will always be the first on the list, followed by all Editor members so you can keep track of users who are close to hitting their limit for AI suite usage.

We’ll show warnings as your approach your limit, and show any features that require an upgrade to unlock. If you are on a plan without limits for a feature, it will permanently show Unlimited in this panel. We’ll add a counter for Unlimited users for tracking purposes in an upcoming update.

6 new stock voices will be rolling out in the coming days. These voices come with some upgrades which we’ll discuss in more detail in upcoming updates. You can find them in the Stock Speakers menu under these names:

More voices are also releasing in the coming weeks.