5 Best AI Updates in Descript 2026

Descript has been using AI to transform the way that we make videos. Things that used to take experienced editors or motion graphic designers hours can now be done with just a few clicks. So in this video, I'm gonna show you the 5 best AI tools that are built directly into Descript and how I use them when I'm editing for YouTube. The first new AI tool I'm gonna show you is what's called Smart Filling Layers. And Smart Filling Layers specifically apply to text layers. So when you apply a layout to a Descript video, the text layer will automatically populate based on what you're talking about in that video. So let me show you how this works. So here in the first scene of my video, If I come over to the layout section, I click on the dropdown, I find the intro section, and I'm just going to click on this first one here. And that applies it. And you can see it currently says default intro, but after a couple of seconds, it populates with the words, you need a script, and then a subtitle. Let me make that a little bigger. That says, even great speakers sound better with one. I didn't write that. Descript's AI came up with that for me. And if it did a good job, I can leave it. If I want to change it, I simply can type in there and change it to say transcript, for example. Now I'm going to show you two more ways you can use this. Let's go to this next scene. So I'm going into scene number two. I click into there. I go back to the choose layout. And what I said there is you need your YouTube scripts to look more like a good book. And less like you just hit record. Okay, so that's kind of a nice quote that stands on its own. So what I can do is scroll down in here and go to the quote section, click on 5 more. So these are little previews of how this is going to look. So some of these keep the camera in there with the text and some of them are just text only. So I'm going to click on this one. And as a placeholder, it says, "Imagination is creativity" from Bono. And then it replaces with, Make your YouTube scripts like a good book, not a random rant. And then it says Descript Mastery. So that's the other way you can use this is as a quote page. And I'm going to show you one more really cool use of this. So right here in my script, I am listing things that you can do. I'm saying you can copy and paste it, you can type, or the third option is import the script by clicking on that white underline there. So I can highlight. That section where I'm listing things, in this case I'm listing 3 different things, I can say change layout. I can scroll through the options here and find the list section. I can click 5 more and I can choose one of these lists that I like. And again, these are little previews of what's going to happen. So this one is going to keep my camera on the right side, put text on the left side with a list. This one's going to put me in the bottom right corner with a list on the screen like that with the black background. I can click on it. And as a placeholder, it says title for bulleted list, first item, second item, third item. And in just a moment, those will populate with the AI-created list. And there we go. It says 3 ways to add your script. And then in the bullet points, it says copy and paste from anywhere, type directly in the teleprompter, import a script file. It did a pretty good job. But it's not perfect because look at this, using the rules of hierarchy, the title there is quite small. So I'm going to want to make that bigger. And let's just do something like that. And now that looks a lot better. And I'd probably need to go in there and make sure they all make sense with what I'm talking about. But you can see how quick and easy that is. And by the way, to make your own smart filling layers, in your own layouts, you can do that with your fonts, your colors, your style, whatever that might look like. And you can do that by clicking on the scene rail here, right-clicking and clicking Save Scene as New Layout. If you want all the steps on that, check out my layout tutorial linked in the description below or in the top right corner of the YouTube video that you're watching right now. So that's smart filling layers. The next incredible AI feature that Descript has built into it is image generation. You can generate images from a prompt. And one tip for you with generating images is use Underlord. Underlord is this thing in the bottom right corner that you can talk to like ChatGPT or Gemini or these other AI tools. And what I told it is generate prompt, prompt only. I don't want it to actually generate the image for me. Yet for generating a background for the opening scene. And it has context on my video. So it said, let me check the opening scene content to craft a relevant prompt based on the opening scene. Here's a prompt for generating a background. And then it gave it to me there in the quotation marks. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to highlight that, the words between the quotation marks, copy it. Then I'm going to come to AI tools. I'm going to come down to the line that says generate an image, click on that. And you can see I already had something pasted in there before, or already had some text in there. I'm just going to highlight over it and then paste the prompt that Underlord came up with for me. And this thing at the top that says digital illustration, I'm going to just hit this little X. I'm going to talk what— talk about what that is in a moment. For now, I'm just gonna hit generate. And while it's working on that, I'm gonna talk about these 3 buttons right here. So the first one is you can add an image. So maybe you've already created an image before, or you like somebody else's image. You can upload that as a reference. And then in your prompt, you can say, based on the uploaded image, make something similar, but replace the character in it with my face or something like that. And then next to that is styles. So you can choose different styles that you want the image that it's creating to look like. So 3D animation, cinematic, et cetera. And you can click browse all to see even more. Next to that, this little cube icon is the image generation model. So the one I just used was called Nanobanana Pro. It's my favorite. In my opinion, it's the best image generation model at the time that I'm making this. But if you click on it, you can see all the other image generation models available to you. Some of these have different strengths and weaknesses. So my recommendation is try them out and see which ones you like. And over on the right side, it tells you how many AI credits they use. So with Descript, you have a monthly allocation of AI credits, and these have varying burn rates based on what they are. Nano Banana Pro, as you can tell, is one of the highest. In my opinion, it's the best at the time of making this. You can also choose a resolution. 1080p is usually a good middle ground. You can choose an aspect ratio. My project is 16:9, so I'm going to leave it on 16:9. And then the number of results, if you click on it, you can have it generate 1 image, 2 images, 3 images, or 4 images. I leave it on 4. It does use more AI credits, but I like to have options. So if I close out of that, our image is now ready. And so if I click on one of these, there's the image it came up with. You can see the prompt was modern creator workspace with soft studio lighting, sleek desk setup. So it did a pretty good job. And you can see I have my 4 different options here. I can click through to different ones. So if I like this one the best, I can click Add as New Layer, and then you can see in my timeline it is now an image layer just like any other image in Descript. I can reposition it, I can make it so that it fills my entire scene, and then I can come into the editor here, click on it, right-click, Layer Order, Send to Back, and now it's a nice background image for me. It's a little hard to read because the white text on the white screen and the lighting. I'm going to go to Properties and I'm going to dial down the opacity. And now it's nice and subtle in the background. You can read the text. And so you can do that anywhere in your video. You can create images of people, you can create images of animals, backgrounds, whatever you want that'll supplement your video. You can do that using the steps that I just showed you. And that leads me to the next thing that we can do in Descript, which is to generate an actual video. So if we go to AI tools, we go, we click the back button there and we come down right below generate an image to generate a video. We click on that and we have the same options here. You can put in a prompt, you can put in a image as a starting point, which I'm going to do. In just a second. You can choose a style and you can choose your model. So I'm going to click on the little paperclip there, and I could pull something out of my project files that's already inside of this project, or I can browse through my whole computer, which I'm going to do, and I'm going to pick a photo. I say open, and now this photo is added as a reference point. So that photo is going to be the first frame of the video that's about to get generated. And it's done. So if I click on this preview right here, it pops up this box so I can preview it. You can see if I slide along, I can see what's happening in this animation, but I can click this play button and there we go. Pretty cool, isn't it? It takes my original image of me sitting in my office and then it created that animation of the background turning into a, a forest. So your imagination is the only limitation now. The fourth cool AI feature is templates, and I'm talking about AI templates. So if you come down to Underlord and we start a new chat by coming up to this button in the top right corner, that's gonna clear out our old chat. So it's letting me know that it, it erases the chat history. I click start new chat, and now I'm inside of a new chat. and I can click, first of all, to help you understand this, browse popular templates. This is gonna appear at the top of every new Underlord chat. This box pops up and any one of these is a template to start a project or to do something to your project. So if I say clean up video recording, I say use template, it automatically drops in a template. If I click on this blue part here, this arrow, this is what it's having Underlord do. So the template is this prompt. It's that pre-made prompt, and that prompt includes a setup and then a workflow that it wants Underlord to follow. And so as soon as I clicked it, it automatically dropped in this set of information, and then Underlord starts its response to my query. But I'm gonna go ahead and undo that. In Underlord, you can click this revert button and that gets rid of the last created prompt, the last entered prompt. But what I'm going to do is come back to the new chat button. I'm going to click start new chat. We're going to go back to browse popular templates. And what you can do is hit this new template button. And there is a prompt entered in there with bullet points that are steps for Underlord to do in my video. Apply studio sound, then normalize audio volume. Then do rough cut, then add chapters throughout, and finally apply the Descript Mastery Layout Pack. So that right there, those 5 steps, that's sort of what I do in every video. That could be a complete template right there that takes my video through the entire editing process. And then I would just hit continue. I would give it a name where it says template title, give it a description so you know what it is. And a custom thumbnail so that you can quickly find it. If you don't give it a custom thumbnail, it's just going to take on the title right there. So that pink background that says Descript Mastery Studio Cut Pack, that would be the thumbnail for this particular template. And then I can choose who has access to it, if it's private, shared with Drive, or shared publicly. And then I would hit publish to save it. But let's go back to the prompt page. Another way I like to do this, another prompt is giving it a prompt for my YouTube descriptions. For example, I could say something like this: create a summary of this video that is suitable for a YouTube description. The description should follow this format, and then you could have executive summary and then 3 bullet points followed by a dash and then some information. And you could also include things in there like, uh, follow the link to my website, don't forget to like and subscribe, things like that. You could have it so that it generates this YouTube description for you every single time in exactly the format that you like. So let's go ahead and test this one out. I'm going to hit continue and I'm going to change the title to— I changed the title to Descript Master YouTube description and the description I said a standard YouTube description. And then I'm going to set this to private and I'm going to hit publish. And it says template saved successfully. And now back inside a blank Underlord prompt, I can say browse popular templates. Click on where it says all templates and change it to created by me. And then I'm going to click on the one that says Descript Master YouTube. And I'm going to click use template. And it drops it into the Underlord chat. And there we go. It followed the exact format I gave it. It put executive summary in bold and then listed items numerically with key points. And so what I could do is just copy this whole thing. If this was a format that I was using, I could copy it, I could paste it into YouTube, edit it. Always, always, always edit AI's work. AI is worthless, or as we say, AI slop, if you don't supply your human context to it and make sure that what it's telling makes sense, that it's in your voice. But you copy that, you paste it into YouTube, make your changes there, and then that just saved you a bunch of work. The 5th and final AI tool that's gotten a huge upgrade recently is the AI avatar feature that allows you to take your likeness, your image, and turn it into a moving avatar on the screen that you can use in your videos. So here's how it works. From inside of a blank project, click Create with AI Speaker, and you'll have to first have an AI speaker trained. If you don't know how to do that, go watch my tutorials on that. I'll link one in the description below. But you select the voice that you want to use. So I'll use my own voice. I'll click choose speaker, and then you can assign an avatar. So here you can type in a prompt and create a fictional person from scratch. You can describe the background, you can describe their race and how they look and all that kind of stuff. And it'll generate that using AI. And you can choose the AI model that you want to use to generate that, or you can upload an actual photo of yourself, which I'm going to do right now by clicking on this paperclip, computer, select a photo of myself and hit open. And using that image, I can click create to create as is, or in this box here, I can type in change the background, put him in a forest, change his clothes so he's in a fancy suit. In fact, I'm going to do that. I said change his clothes so he's in a fancy suit, leave everything else the same. And then I'm going to change the model to Nano Banana Pro. Again, that's my favorite one at the time of recording this. And I click create. So again, what is creating right now is the image that is going to become my avatar. Okay. And it's done. And I can click on each of these to see how it looks. And you can check that out. And by the way, here's the original. So I was wearing a sweatshirt and my office is in the background, and it kept the background the same, kept my face the same. It just changed my clothes. And there's 3 different versions. So the first one, I'm kind of in a pinstripe suit. That one's kind of a charcoal suit, and that one I have a blue tie. So I'm gonna use this one right here, and I'm gonna say assign avatar. So now this avatar has been paired with my AI speaker voice from step number 1, and now it puts me back into my project. And then what I need to do next is give this content to work with. So I need to actually type in here a script, or I'm going to actually paste in the words that I said at the very beginning of this video that you're watching right now. I'm going to come up to the top and say, done writing. And as soon as I do that, You see these spinning, these spinning dots? That's generating this script into my AI voice. And now those are done and we can listen to it. Script has been using AI to transform the way. And you can see when I'm playing, it says static preview, generate avatar. So the avatar hasn't been generated yet. That requires clicking on the image and then in this menu that pops up over it. Say generate, and it can say, it says here that this is going to be an 18-second video. And right here next to the generate button, you can choose the model that you want to use for generating this avatar. And what has just recently changed in Descript is the introduction of Kaling Avatar V2. And this is a giant upgrade. It is really good now and it looks very, very convincing. However, be aware that that does burn a lot of credits. So you wanna be careful using that because you could burn through your allocation very quickly using those. So given that, I just paused my video. I trimmed this down, so I'm not gonna burn so much AI credits, and I'm gonna click on my image once again. I'm gonna click generate, and I'm gonna change this to Kaling Avatar V2 Pro. And by the way, this number here is per minute, so it's not gonna just use 138 credits no matter what. It's 138 credits per minute. Okay, hit generate and I'll be back when it's done. And it's done. Let's see how this looks. So again, my starting frame and it's going to animate it. Descript has been using AI to transform the way we make videos. Okay, not bad. Much better than it used to be when I first started showing these. These Descript AI tools have sped up my editing and make my videos more creative than ever before. But there's one other thing I started using that made my edits 10 times faster in Descript. So watch this video next to find out what it was that dramatically accelerated my editing speed beyond what I thought was even possible.