Release roundup—August 29th, 2025

New in Labs—Cursor Presence

When you're collaborating on a project with teammates, we now display their cursors as they move throughout the composition. This makes it easier to follow what they're looking at or editing—helping everyone stay in sync without asking, "Where are you right now?"

How it works

See your teammates' cursors when they're active in the same project
Cursors appear with your teammate's name or avatar next to them
The composition selector shows who's currently working where

This is currently available for everyone, though some users will see it turned on by default:

50% of users will have Cursor presence turned ON by default
50% of users will have Cursor presence turned OFF by default
Everyone can manually control this setting in the Labs section the Settings menu

How to turn it on or off

Open Settings in Descript
Go to the Labs section
Find Cursor presence and toggle it on or off

Note: Turning off Cursor Presence only changes what you see. You won't see other people's cursors, but teammates will still see yours if they have the feature on.

Try out Cursor Presence today and let us know what you think.

New in image generation—Nano Banana

We’re excited to add Nano Banana (also known as Gemini Flash Image) to our image generation model options.

What makes Nano Banana special?

Nano Banana excels at maintaining consistency in details across image generations, allowing you to change subtle details or take big swing without worrying about whether you'll lose the core of your prompts.

How to access Nano Banana

To enable Nano Banana for image generation:

Go to Settings → General
Select Nano Banana from the dropdown menu
Use it with either Underlord or via AI Tools for image generation

Additionally, we will now place any generated images into your AI assets folder within the Project files menu immediately after generating.

Please note: If you delete them from this folder, they will be removed from your history.

New in AI Speakers—Eleven Labs V3

While we’re on the topic of new AI models, we’ve also added Eleven Labs V3 as an option for AI speech generation.

Eleven Labs V3 offers significant improvements in natural speech quality that can sound as good as recorded voiceover. It also supports inline prompts in brackets (e.g., [angry], [sigh]) to adjust tone, accent, or add nonverbal sounds

How to access Eleven Labs V3

Go to User Settings → General → Advanced
Find "Default AI speech generation model"
Select "Eleven Labs V3 (Alpha)" from the dropdown menu

No additional steps are required - you don't need to create new custom voices or adjust any project settings.

Important to know

While Eleven Labs V3 offers significant improvements, there are a few things to consider:

This model is in alpha, meaning it is still being tested and improved upon
The model may struggle with consistent voice continuity across multiple generations
All custom voices and some stock voices are affected by the new model

Export menu updates

We’ve made a few changes to the Export dropdown, and added a new option to create smaller sized files when using a Descript web link.

What’s new?

GIF exports have been consolidated into the Video tab
We’ve increased the size of the thumbnail preview
There’s a new Optimize file size option for Descript web links

What is "Optimize File Size"?

The new toggle for "Optimize file size (slower)" allows you to create smaller video files when exporting your projects to a Descript web link. While enabling this option will add some extra processing time to your export, it can dramatically reduce file sizes.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug preventing layout change when using Create clips
Fixed a bug preventing clip creation w/ error message when using a Russian script
Fixed a bug resulting in Rooms files failing to upload
Fixed a bug resulting in Avatar generation failure w/ error message
Fixed a bug resulting in Recordings being delivered with mismatched audio/video length
Fixed a bug causing AI video maker to fail