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 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.

We’ve re-built and relabeled our AI video maker adding a host of new features including Avatars, automatic layouts, captions, titles, scenes and even b-roll.

Select AI video maker from the Home screen to get started. From here you can start generating your video by:

If you select either , or you’ll first select an Avatar to be your presenter, along with an AI speaker to voice it. If you select “Upload a file” - we’ll take you straight to generating b-roll, or auto-selecting stock media for your b-roll.

Once you’ve made your selections, the video will start generating, and you can either Export immediately, or dive in and edit it. If you’re using a pre-recorded video, but prefer an Avatar, you can always swap it out inside the project.

This tool is a great way to bring a quick idea to life, or just try out Descript’s editing features with no barrier to entry in terms of having an idea or pre-recorded material.

Development of our new Screen recorder is moving forward. This week, we’re removing the Beta label.

Even more updates are coming to the screen recorder, so stay tuned.

Back in February, we rolled out major improvements to speaker quality to our Business and Enterprise users. We have improved the quality even more and are deploying both sets of improvements to all users in the coming weeks. You should notice a higher overall audio quality with better, more natural delivery. This also means that we will soon be fully deprecating custom speakers made with our very old models. These are labeled as "Removing soon" in the AI Speakers menu in Drive view. If you’re still using one, you’ll want to create a new custom speaker with the upgraded models by 6/30/2025. You can do this by clicking the "New speaker" button in the top right of the AI speakers menu in Drive view.

We're excited to introduce a new Home screen in Drive view, making it easier than ever to start your next project. When you open Descript, you'll find a streamlined landing page with quick-start options for all your creation needs - whether you want to edit a video, make a podcast, create social clips, transcribe a file, clean up audio, or remove backgrounds.

The new Home screen is designed to help you find what you need faster, including a Recent projects view. You'll also discover our popular features front and center, including Translation & dubbing capabilities. These will rotate over time as new features are introduced.

The hope with this update is to remove the uncertainty of a blank page project and putting the full power of Descript at your fingertips from the moment you open the app. The new Home screen is rolling out to all users in version 112.

A few weeks back we created a new AI Video maker in the ChatGPT store. This tool automatically generates a video explainer on a topic of your choosing, with customizable style and tone. Now, we’ve brought this experience into the app, available from the new Home screen, so you can create narrated, illustrated video with just a few clicks. It’s a great way to experiment with the tools Descript has to offer, or make a quick piece of content for easy sharing.

We're introducing a redesigned Editor recorder experience in version 112. The recorder now lives in the play dock instead of the sidebar, making it more accessible within your workflow. When recording with an empty script, the recorder takes up your full screen for better focus. If there's content in your script, you can see it while recording - the recorder will only occupy the Scene Editor area. The redesign aims to make recording more intuitive and accessible, integrating seamlessly with your workflow while maintaining visibility of important content during recording sessions.

Stable frame is a new feature that intelligently positions the playhead to show the most representative frame when selecting scenes or layers. When clicking on scenes from the scene rail or script boundary, or layers from the canvas, the system accounts for animations and scene transitions to display the most stable and useful frame (i.e. one that is not in the middle of animating.)

These stable frames will also be used for the Scene thumbnail to make scene rail more useful as a visual representation of the storyboard or through line of your project.

This enhancement addresses a common user pain point where the playhead might land mid-animation, resulting in a confusing or unclear view of the scene.

We’ve added two new placeholder layer types to the Elements panel for Camera and Screen video. These will to help you keep your project organized as you’re assembling layouts, and make it easier to remember where you will eventually place your content.

The three placeholder layer types are now labeled:

You can adjust these layers like any other Scene element, applying animations or transitions. Once you're ready to add your media, you can do so from the Scene-editor → Add media.

Here's what's new in Rooms:

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.

Rooms, our new collaborative recording experience is out of Beta and ready for general use.

And we’ve added nice new features including more control for hosts and a network health indicator.

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.

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.

We’ve made some major improvements to working with Text elements like captions and overlays.

Here are the details:

And finally, adding periods to abbreviations and numbers will no longer add a line break to captions. This would normally be in the bug fixes section, but it was such a long standing issue that we thought you’d like to know that it is finally fixed.

Descript now automatically detects and transcribes the correct language of your audio, making it easier to work with content in different languages. When uploading new files, "Auto" is now the default language option in the transcription settings.

Existing users who have already set their preferred transcription language won't be affected by this change. You can still manually select a specific language from the dropdown menu in the transcription settings, or set a specific default language in the general Settings menu.

Translation in multiple languages can now be done all at once with this handy dropdown.

Your translations will then be available from within the composition view using the dropdown menu in the upper left corner of the Composition. When using this for captions-only, the completion time is extremely fast.

If you go back for more translations, we’ll mark any languages you’ve already generated with a green dot.

If you submit a new translation for one of existing languages, it will overwrite it with a new version. This will also overwrite any corrections you’ve made. We’ll show this warning just in case.

We hope to add the option to export translations in batches in the future as well.

There are new high quality stock speakers available exclusively for dubbing in our 4 supported languages: French, Italian, German, and Spanish

These new stock voices, provided by 11Labs are designed for the target language, and will provide much better results than our standard sock voices when working with a non-English language translation. These voices will be rolling out slowly, but you should have access by the end of this week.

Note: These new voices are available on Business and Enterprise plans only.

We’ve added a new feature to Labs called Smart transitions. This is a new style of transition that can be added between scenes. This is a powerful tool for transitioning between different layouts, as smart transition will smoothly rearrange, zoom, and fade elements on the fly.

Add fades ON: Fades are added between non-contiguous layers (i.e. two separate clips.) Fades will NOT be added in contiguous clips that cross the scene barrier.

Add fades OFF: We will not fade any layers.

We’re excited to get some early feedback on this feature so please give it a try and let us know what you think using the Feedback button in the Settings → Labs menu.

Descript’s new Desktop experience is also available from the Labs menu. This new desktop app put the speed and performance improvements of our web version into a local package. If you’ve been using the Desktop preview, this is the soon-to-be-final version.

Be among the first to switch over and enjoy the benefits.

A few weeks ago we announced a new and improved web-based checkout system. We initially rolled it out to 50% of our users. We have now made it available to all users. When purchasing or editing a subscription, you will be taken to a web browser with an improved interface making it clearer what will change and the associated costs.

The Subscription panel has been split into two segments:

There is now an option to Replace media when using the Canvas toolbar. This is a quick way to swap out a layer, especially when you have a layer that was imported from a layout. You can select from Project files, Backgrounds, Stock Media, and more.

You can also access this option from the right-click menu next on any Layer.

We’ve made some changes to the loading state when AI Text to Speech is being generated.

You’ll no longer see indistinct pulsing text — instead there’s a new loading indicator that appears the moment you click “Done writing” and submit your text for generation. A checkmark will appear as soon as it completes loading and is ready for playback.

We’ve also added an option to Regenerate AI Speech to the right click menu if you’d like to get a different take on it.