(Interface picture courtesy of Descript)
Descript has launched a revamped interface for its desktop app designed to make the usually arcane strategy of enhancing audio and video easier for non-specialist creators and companies. The five-year-old San Francisco-based firm additionally introduced it has raised $50 million in a Collection C spherical led by the OpenAI Startup Fund.
The corporate billed the brand new interface as “its greatest product replace ever.” The Descript app works on each Home windows and Mac, and can be utilized offline for downloaded initiatives, however does most of its heavy lifting within the cloud, boosted by synthetic intelligence instruments.
“The stage is ready for video to take its place alongside textual content as one thing everybody makes use of to create and talk — the one issues holding it again are the instruments,” mentioned Descript CEO Andrew Mason in a launch. “With the brand new Descript, we’ve changed the drudgery of timeline enhancing with a instrument that’s as acquainted because the phrase processor — so you can also make, edit, and share video with out breaking your inventive circulate.”
The largest change is a shift to what the corporate calls “Scenes,” as a part of its broader “Storyboard” interface replace. Reasonably than drive enhancing by way of a standard timeline of audio and/or video tracks, every Scene represents a little bit of dialog to which a picture or video is connected. The Scenes may be reordered, and textual content inside them edited, shortening the connected picture or video.
Among the many different new capabilities are:
- a library of inventory media that features “tens of millions” of belongings in video, GIFs, GIF stickers, photos, sound results, and music;
- templates that may shortly arrange layouts, title sequences and clips for social sharing;
- a recorder that now mechanically breaks up multi-person recordings into a number of tracks for straightforward enhancing and export into DAWs reminiscent of Logic Professional and Premiere Professional;
- a inexperienced display screen perform that may shortly clip out the topic of a video from the background and substitute a brand new background from the inventory media or different sources;
- A writing mode that can be utilized to create a script with connected video and pictures that in flip can leverage this system’s speech synthesis capabilities to create a cloned model of the creator’s voice, add different text-to-speech voices, or do a stay overdub.
This system additionally has simplified capabilities to enhancing recording high quality, the flexibility to mechanically take away “filler phrases” reminiscent of “,” conversion to vertical and sq. social-media codecs, in addition to subtitles, display screen and webcams recording, and collaboration capabilities.
The professional model prices $30 a month, and lots of the gee-whiz capabilities are solely out there by way of that subscription tier.
This system is considered one of an rising class of AI-powered content-creation instruments designed to scale back the obstacles to entry and complexity for non-specialists. Many are both part-time creators or have that accountability as a part of their work duties, notably in smaller organizations. This system can both be used for enhancing video content material or audio-only initiatives reminiscent of podcasts and audiograms.
For these courses of content material creators, whose numbers are burgeoning throughout the web, highly effective skilled software program packages from corporations reminiscent of Apple
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Additionally notable is the corporate’s newest funding spherical, a very giant elevate amid a foul financial local weather for tech corporations as layoffs and spending cuts hit even the largest corporations. The $50 million Collection C spherical brings to $100 million the quantity of funding capital Descript has raised. Backers of the corporate’s newest spherical embody a few of tech’s greatest names.
The lead investor is a fund backed by OpenAI, a non-profit targeted on integrating synthetic intelligence into inventive functions, most famously with its DALL-E 2 text-to-image generator. The group is backed by Microsoft
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“We began the OpenAI Startup Fund to speed up the impression corporations constructing on highly effective AI could have on the world, and we’re notably enthusiastic about instruments that empower folks creatively,” mentioned OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who manages the startup fund. “It’s clear from utilizing Descript and speaking to clients that Descript is breaking down obstacles between thought and creation by extending video enhancing capabilities to a wholly new class of creators.”
Different members within the Collection C Spherical embody Silicon Valley heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures, Spark Capital, Twitter and Medium founder Ev Williams, Justine “iJustine” Ezarik and Daniel Gross. Descript CEO Mason is co-founder of Groupon.
