Underlord is ready to collaborate—and it’s free. You’ll see it when you open Descript. Click the icon in the bottom right corner to start chatting with an AI co-editor that knows what a good video looks like and knows how to make it.

And did we mention it's free? From now until the end of August, using Underlord won’t count against your monthly AI limits (but using AI tools yourself will), so now is the time to take it for a spin. It’s still in beta, but getting more powerful every day.

. Just describe what you want, and let Underlord do the heavy lifting.

It can add dubbing or one of our native-sounding AI speakers.

Upload a PDF of your slide presentation; Underlord will turn it into a video. It can write a script for the talk track, if you want.

It can identify the most clip-worthy moments and set them up for you.

Apply scene transition effects like fades, crossfades, directional wipes, star wipes, and blurs. It can also add animations like Ken Burns, pans, and zooms.

Check out our Learn Descript tutorial.

You can learn more about effectively prompting Underlord in our Help Center.

If you don't want to use Underlord to brainstorm, write scripts, edit your videos, make social clips, or anything, we won’t force you. For now, you don’t even have to look at it. You can turn it off in Labs settings.

This update also introduces a number of important changes to the layout of the sidebar:

Looking for more tutorials? Head to Learn Descript.

For Business and Enterprise users, we’re announcing the new Brand studio - a centralized workspace that brings together all your Drive's branding tools in one place. Now you can manage visual and language assets seamlessly, ensuring your team maintains brand consistency across every project.

Brand Studio provides a unified view of your team's branding assets, from fonts to layouts to language tools.

Brand studio allows you to view your Drive's custom fonts for use in layout packs and captions, build a transcription glossary, create a do not translate list and much more:

Brand Studio access is tailored to each user's role:

With Brand Studio, your team can now maintain brand consistency without sacrificing productivity. Every video stays on-brand, every time.

Now available for all users with a paid plan, the layout pack remix tool lets you personalize our professional layouts with your brand colors and fonts to create a consistent visual identity across all your videos.

Access the remix tool directly from the layout picker in any of these locations:

Once in the layout picker, just click the button in the top-left corner to start customizing.

Start with any layout pack from our gallery, then personalize it with:

Once created, your custom layout pack appears in the layout picker ready to use in any project—giving your videos a consistent, professional look that's uniquely yours.

Control Room is a long-requested, and powerful new feature that lets producers, and collaborators manage live recording sessions without appearing on screen or in the final recording. If you were familiar with SquadCast’s Backstage feature, you’ll feel right at home in Control Room.

Control Room introduces two new roles: Producer and Co-Host, creating flexible workflows for professional production teams:

Control room is available now for Business and Enterprise plans. Business plans support up to 3 producers in the Control Room, while Enterprise plans support up to 10 producers.

Whether you're coordinating talent, managing high-stakes interviews, or ensuring flawless production quality, Control Room gives you the professional flexibility needed to deliver polished content every time.

Descript now offers stock speakers for multiple non-English languages. These new voices allow you to create more natural-sounding content in languages beyond English, with speakers specifically optimized for accurate pronunciation and authentic delivery.

Stock speakers are now available for Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (BR), Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Swedish. These specialized voices help you create professional multilingual content with natural intonation and accent.

To access these new speakers, click the three-line drop down in the Speaker menu, set Non-english speakers to “Show” and select the appropriate AI voice when working with non-English text.

You can now generate custom avatars for your videos using just a text description—no photo uploads required. Simply enter a creative prompt describing the avatar you want, and Descript will generate three image options for you to choose from. This new feature eliminates the friction of photo uploads while providing consistent, high-quality results that work perfectly with Descript's avatars.

We've renamed the Ducking audio effect to Lower audio of other layers to make it more intuitive and easier to understand, especially for new users.

Along with this name change, we've also made an important workflow improvement: this effect is no longer applied by default to any layer. This change helps ensure that audio mixing remains more intentional and predictable in your projects.

These updates are part of our ongoing effort to make Descript's features more accessible while giving you greater control over your audio mixing process.

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We’ve added a new Labs setting that allows you to upload files into your project from your mobile device. This is especially useful for users who record their media using a smart phone rather than a digital camera. Once you toggle it on, just click the “Upload from Mobile” button in your project to receive a QR code. Scan the code and you can then add any media files from your device directly into your Project.

Starting today, we’re toggling the new timeline experience ON in Labs for everyone.

If you haven’t had a chance to try it yet: We've completely redesigned the timeline to make video editing simpler and more intuitive. The new timeline gives you a clearer view of your video and makes it faster to trim, split, and add scenes directly from the timeline.

To open the new timeline, hover over the solid grey bar above the play button and use your mouse to drag it .

This update comes with so many small changes and improvements we recommend that you view the video above as well our help center article to get acquainted.

There’s also a new dropdown menu in the upper lefthand side of the screen right next to the button. This menu contains a number of quick access options and settings for different areas of the Editor window:

The new timeline turned on for all users. If you need extra time to get up to speed, you can temporarily opt out by disabling it in . However, we'll be transitioning all users to the new timeline experience in the near future.

If you're on Desktop, we also release an update that requires a restart. It fixes a few bugs.

We’ve added a new Smart fill tool for text layers when you apply a layout from the gallery. It reads the script track and automatically fills text layers like titles and lists with relevant details from your transcription.

This is a great way to save time with a better-than-blank placeholder, or final text if you’re satisfied with the results.

This setting is toggled on by default for any of our premade layout packs, but you can toggle it on or off for your custom layout packs from the Layout pack menu in Drive view.

There’s a new illustration style for AI generated media when using both the AI video maker (available from the Home screen) and the Quick design action on the sidebar. The new setting is a brightly colored “collage” art style using more abstracted shapes for a more modern and lighthearted look.

You can now adjust the A/V sync of files automatically from the Project panel. This allows you to fix audio/video sync issues by applying a positive value to delay the video, or a negative value to advance the video.

This should save you time if you've been manually adjusting A/V sync issues using the Sequence editor.

We’re now able to process Green screen (background removal) and Blur speaker background instantly, without the need for long processing times. We’ve also removed the Beta label on Blur speaker background. This update is rolling out slowly over the next few days, so if you aren’t seeing these effects process instantly, check back soon.

We’ve added a secondary button to Generate your avatar to the Scene editor toolbar. This is just to make this option more prominent in the case that you haven’t Generated your avatar yet after adding it to a project.

A few weeks ago we had to disable the ability to Hide the recording dock on Windows when using the Screen recorder in order to resolve some bugs. We have reverted this change - and you will now have the recording dock automatically hidden from your final recordings when using Windows.

We’ve added a teleprompter to both the Editor recorder, and to the Screen recorder. The new teleprompter allows you to type a script, paste a script, or import a script from a project. You can then set a text size, and scroll speed.

The teleprompter comes also comes with:

The scroll speed has two settings:

The teleprompter will be automatically hidden from any recordings you make.

This is a long-standing feature request, and we’re excited to finally get it into your hands.

Also by popular request, we’ve added a big, easy to find Undo button to the main Editor control panel.

No more hunting through menus or memorizing the keyboard shortcut () just click the button to Undo your last action.

We’ve added a toggle to the Remove filler words AI action. You can now toggle on the “Avoid harsh cuts” setting, and our updated modal will analyze each removed filler word to ensure that it can be removed cleanly, without creating a harsh or jarring edit boundary that will be distracting for your viewers.

If a filler word cannot be removed cleanly it will be skipped to preserve the flow of your content.

Keep in mind, this is analyzing for harsh audio cuts, so you may still see video cuts that you need to adjust manually. It also adds a small amount of processing time when removing filler words.

Regenerate, our tool that regenerates sections of your script to make corrections without needing to re-record, can now regenerate sections of your video without creating awkward lip-sync issues.

When you make script corrections or want to adjust the tone, Regenerate video will automatically generate AI speech and video that flows naturally. As always, you’ll need to consent from any speakers included in the regenerated section. Regenerate video can take up a few minutes to process. In the background, we’re regenerating the audio first, and then regenerating the video to match.

Keep in mind that this feature is in beta, and still being improved. At present, it can only be applied to your Script track, and cannot be applied to any other layers.

It works best when the speaker is centered in frame with their mouth visible. It also works best with video files under 4K.

You can now use the Quick design action under the section of Underlord to quickly format your single-scene projects with scenes, layouts and B-roll. Just click the Quick design option and select from AI-generated B-roll, or Stock media. We’ll take care of the rest, detecting your layers and applying an appropriate layout.

This currently only works if you haven’t added scenes to your projects yet. We’ll post an update as soon as this can be applied to projects that already have scenes.

We now automatically apply a default layout to your recordings. This will select a layout based on the number of layers if one is not already selected. You can change to a different layout from the scene panel.

Over the last 6 months, we’ve slowly moved all of our users onto an upgraded version of the Desktop app that provides better performance, stability, and eliminates the need to keep local files for editing.

This new version also gives us the ability to make more frequent updates to fix bugs, implement changes to our backend, and more, without forcing you to update the app.

As a result, our version numbering system is no longer particularly relevant for most releases. We’ll still be posting changelog updates regularly—they’ll just be more of a roundup style to catch important changes, feature updates, and bug fixes.

Starting today, you can try out the new Underlord, available in Labs. It’s no longer just a suite of AI tools, it’s an AI co-editor that can help you write, design, and edit your video. Just tell it what you want, and it'll make a plan and get after it. It can read your script, follow directions, offer feedback, and more. And because it's inside Descript, it has every tool it needs to help you make the video you want.

Toggle it on by visiting the Settings menu → General tab → Labs section. Or just click here.

It’s still in beta—so we’re giving you free, unlimited use. From now through the end of June, taking any AI action with the new Underlord will count against your monthly AI limit (but clicking on them yourself will).

You can find details about getting started in our Help center.

We’ve made a few improvements to the AI video maker, which you can find on the Home screen. Here’s what’s new:

You can try it right now by clicking here.

We’re using a new and improved image generator when you select “Generate an image” from the Underlord panel on the sidebar. You’ll see an overall improvement in the quality of images. This has not yet been ported over to the AI video maker, so keep in mind you’ll be seeing images generating from the older image generation model when using that tool—for the time being.

We no longer support invite links to Drive, instead we’ve improved the experience for email invites. This helps keep Drive invites more organized and easier to track whether or not they have been accepted.

We’re rolling out a fully redesigned, and reconsidered Timeline view in Labs this week. Labs is our testing ground for new and exciting features that are still in development. You can toggle on this new Timeline experience by opening the Settings menu → General → and scrolling down to the Labs section.

The new timeline comes with many changes, which is why we’re putting it in Labs for users to get acquainted, and to allow more time for testing and polish.

Here’s what you need to know:

You can read more about all the changes in our help center, including a video walkthrough from Andrew.