Release Roundup—July 15th, 2025

New in Rooms—Control Room
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:
Add Producers:
 Operate from the recording room while remaining completely invisible. You won't be seen, heard, or recorded.
Assign Co-Hosts
: Co-hosts can do everything a Host can do.
Push-to-Talk:
 Producers can use the Push-to-talk button to temporarily speak to everyone or individuals in the recording room to provide discreet guidance or keep talent on track.
Direct messaging:
 Team members can chat privately during sessions through DMs, enabling discreet behind-the-scenes communication.
Live annotations with Editor comments:
 Producers, co-hosts and hosts can use the Editor comment button to add timestamped comments that sync directly into the Descript script (in the editor), helping editors quickly locate key moments.
Complete control with new roles:
 Producers and co-hosts have all the powers of a host, including managing settings, guest AV inputs, and controlling the recording start/stop.
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.
New—Stock speakers for non-english languages
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.
Text to Avatar—Create Custom Avatars with Just a Prompt
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.
Editor updates
Ducking is now “Lower audio of other layers”
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.
Other editor updates
:
We now support emojis in text layers when you publish your project. In the past these could cause errors.
If you add an Avatar to a speaker in a project with a screen recording in the Script, or without a Script track, we’ll now automatically put the Avatar in a speaker bubble.
New in Labs—Upload from Mobile
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.
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug causing script layer to become hidden when merging scenes.
Fixed a bug causing settings menu to hide the rest of the window when using keyboard shortcuts.
Fixed a bug preventing users from adjusting settings for multiple layers using the Mixed settings slider.
Fixed a bug preventing users from dubbing some translated compositions resulting in a project crash.
Fixed a bug causing audio to be missing from Guest file in a Rooms project.
Fixed a bug on Windows that caused Scene boundary adjustments to add an image instead.
Fixed a bug causing Stock media searches to change when playhead is moved.
Fixed a bug causing Audio projects to change to video when adding an audio file.
Fixed a bug causing “seek to” actions to land on the wrong timecode.
Fixed a bug preventing Blur background slider in some cases where All Scenes is selected.
Fixed a bug causing Flatten tracks to place the Script track above all other layers.