Release roundup—September 17, 2026

We got a bit behind in posting on the changelog this summer (well, one of us did). But we've been busy at work adding new, improved, and fixed features. Captions now have presets and animations, Descript's AI can make background music and sound effects on request, and you can now pay with Apple Pay, Cash App, or others. Twenty-odd other updates below.

Looking for Gabe’s video? It’s on the way! He’s in NY this week at Podcast Movement meeting many of you in person. We'll update this post once we have it.

Presets apply when you click them. Every style you already use is in the list. Nothing was taken away; there's just more of what you already love.

Describe the audio you need (we love generic plinky piano beat for software videos) and Descript's AI drops it onto your timeline at the length you asked for. Background music for a section, a whoosh, a doorbell, a knock at the door. No stock site, no library subscription, no scrolling through four hundred results named "Lo-Fi Beats Vol. 3."

Paying from outside the US used to mean doing conversion math, or finding out what it actually cost you after your bank processed the payment. Now the price shows up in your currency. And there are more ways to pay it: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, Cash App, Naver Pay, Kakao Pay, and South Korean local cards.

Replace the audio on a recording with an AI voice. Your script stays the same; Descript reads it back in the voice you pick. Useful when the take is fine, the audio isn't, and you can't record it again.

Anywhere Descript asks you to pick a voice, that list now comes from the ElevenLabs voice library instead of our own short set. Many more voices, in the same picker you already use.

You could schedule a Room in August; now it can go ahead without you. Open the invite link, join, record into the pinned project. Open the invite link, join, record into the pinned project. You pick who can start a recording when you schedule it: host only, project viewers, or drive members. Everyone else has to knock.

Collapse the Script Editor or the Scene Editor and the other one takes the whole window. Works like the existing timeline collapse.

Smoothing jump cuts used to be a one-at-a-time job. Now lists every cut in the composition so you can pick, and does the lot. Jump cuts are a search type too: Cmd+F, select jump cuts, step through.

Softens skin on camera, for anyone shooting under lighting they didn't choose. From the effects menu or as an AI action.

Anyone in a Rooms call can drop an image into chat: paste, drag, or attach. Images render inline and expand on click. Guests too.

Google Drive import now works in the browser, not just the desktop app.

Our Zapier app is out of the waiting room and into Zapier's Connectors marketplace, at parity with the API. Anything the API can do, a Zap can do too (is that an Irving Berlin reference?).

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The 10 new text animations aren't captions-only. They work on any text layer you animate.

Drop shadows render with a shader now, so they follow the edges of transparent images and skip the faint white line. Long-standing request.

Smart transitions no longer fade in on the first scene, so your video doesn't open on black. The most common complaint at the Season 12 livestream.

You can now scrub through a translated composition. Previously you could not, which is a sentence we're not proud of.

Exports now have a toggle for the embedded SRT track, the one that gives viewers captions they can turn off. It used to always be on.

Timeline export to Pro Tools, Logic, and Audition got rebuilt and got faster. Most of all when your media is already local, or you're exporting without it.

New AI model behind center active speaker, rolling out gradually. On web it's still a visual effect, not something you edit.

We pre-compute video chunks right after upload, so seeking pulls from cache instead of transcoding on the spot. Roughly 2 to 5 times faster in testing. We announced this in August, but now it's rolled out to everyone.

If Descript hits an error merging concurrent edits, you get a modal instead of silence. Restore the lost version, export it, compare in a new tab, or dismiss.

The editor now warns you if it detects the Grammarly browser extension. The extension has a habit of fighting with the Script Editor, and the Script Editor was here first.

Uploads and processing now report from the top of the window, with a progress row per file instead of one bar for the whole batch. When something stalls, you can see which file it is.

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