Vocal Video Release Notes

v58, released September 1, 2024

With v58, we've added the ability to blur or replace the background behind speakers in video scenes using AI.

v57, released August 15, 2024

Minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

v56, released July 11, 2024

Minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

v55, released June 15, 2024

With v55, the speed of publishing videos was dramatically improved. Customers will note that almost all videos are now published in under five minutes. Additional improvements were made to the integration directory.

v54, released April 30, 2024

With v54, we’ve made it easy to connect Vocal Video to  6,000+ apps & services, including CRM, ATS, email automation, messaging apps, and AI. Plus, we've created an integration directory with 100+ pre-built templates to connect to the most popular platforms. Read this guide to learn how it works and see some step-by-step examples.

v53, released March 1, 2024

It’s easier than ever to collaborate with your team within Vocal Video. Check out this article for more in-depth details.

Sharing: You can now share responses, published videos, and more within your organization. You can post comments for your teammates to interact with - just tag them with an @-mention. If a colleague doesn’t have a Vocal Video account yet, it’s no problem. Tagging them will trigger an invitation to create a login and collaborate on your team account.

Notifications: To make sure you never miss an update on anything that you’re following, we’ve added a Notifications Center within your dashboard.

v52, released January 12, 2024

Minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

v51, released December 12th, 2023

With v50, we released the Team Discovery feature. Users within your organization can find existing Vocal Video team accounts at sign up. 

v50, released November 16th, 2023

v50 made it easier for all customers to get the features they need, while customizing users and video processing as needed. 

• More flexibility to grow: All plans now make it easy to scale up to working with a team. More details here.
• More control: Your plan includes a set amount of video processing. Once you surpass your limit, you can upgrade to get more processing. More details here.
• More workspaces: Upgrade to Pro, and get the option to support up to 10 workspaces and brands. More details here.

v49, released August 4th, 2023

With this major release, we’ve redesigned the entire user interface to make it easier to navigate Vocal Video, track your analytics, edit responses, and search for videos. You can also now use Vocal Video in either light or dark mode. Check out this article for more in-depth details.

Dashboard: We’ve introduced a faster and more intuitive navigation system throughout the entire site, accessibility in toggling between workspaces, increased video organization, and a new approach to account analytics. Our improved left-side navigation includes a Workspace Switcher at the top, and faster navigation to your Brand Kit, user settings, video uploads, and settings.

Workspaces: Workspaces allow you to create content for multiple brands or departments, and easily set up unique branding for each one.

Organization: Optimized for power users, you can now search, filter, and sort your videos, uploaded video clips, Collectors, and Galleries. Starring allows easy access for later.

Stats & Analytics: Key metrics, like responses collected, videos published, and gallery views are displayed for your workspace and across all workspaces you have access to.

Video Editor: We’ve made improvements to the video editor, improving functionality with a Scenes sidebar. The sidebar will always highlight the current scene during playback, and you can just click on a scene to jump playback to that scene and open the configuration panel for that scene.

v48, released April 21st, 2023

Minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

v47, released March 17th, 2023

With v47, we added the ability to customize Open Graph images and meta descriptions for Video Collector links. When you post a link to a website to social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other supported sites, the Open Graph image is the thumbnail that’s displayed.

We also added Kiosk Mode, which makes it easy to set up your Collector on an iPad during live events.

v46, released March 10th, 2023

With v46, you’ll see a new countdown in the Video Collector to allow respondents to get ready before starting their response. We’ve also improved the color balance and brightness of videos.

v45, released March 1st, 2023

Minor bug fixes and performance improvements.

v44, released February 28th, 2023

With v44, you’ll find three new premium video themes in the Video Editor under Design, each with a different look and feel for transitions, text scenes, attribution bars, fonts, borders, and more. You can switch between themes easily, and all can be further customized.We’ve also made improvements to the default video theme Europa, and introduced 7 new background music tracks.

v43, released December 28th, 2022

With v43, you’ll see brand new fonts available in your account, and a more intuitive way to set your color palette in the Video Editor and Settings. We also added a way to have music volume fade in the last five seconds of any video edited in the Vocal Video Editor.

Fonts
Within the Vocal Video Editor, all customers get access to ten new fonts for subtitle, video headings and quotes in Galleries. Pro customers unlock an additional 50 premium fonts, and Enterprise customers can email support@vocalvideo.com with the file of the brand font to add it to their account. 

Color Fields
You’ll now find new options for setting colors in the Vocal Video Editor. Users can customize every aspect of their video using intuitive new Color Design controls. Account-level defaults can be further customized in Settings. You can choose a default theme, format, cropping, fonts, soundtrack, transcription language, and more.

v42, released November 10, 2022

With v42, we added additional options for the production value of videos. You can check out all of the options below in a video draft.

• New premium theme, Callisto. 
• 100+ background options to use in videos
• Moving background effects for more eye-catching videos

v41, released October 7, 2022

With v41, we introduced a Solo Monthly subscription. You can learn more about our current pricing here.

We also made various performance improvements.

v40, released September 28, 2022

With v40, we introduced a new level of customization possible in the Video Collectors. Vocal Video users are now able to entirely localize a video Collector, or make specific copy edits on all pages including the following:

• Tips
• Attribution fields
• Additional text fields

Tips that were previously encoded in the Collector can now be edited for each question. We added new attribution options that are completely customizable. All the introductory text can be customized. Users can entirely localize the Video Collector with whatever language their subjects speak, and set up that Collector to transcribe in one of 21 different languages.

v39, released September 8, 2022

With v39, videos are now uploaded with more accurate color using BT.709 colorspace, a standard developed by ITU-R for image encoding and signal characteristics of high-definition television. 

We also released changes to our plans and pricing.

v38, released August 5th, 2022 

With v38, we redesigned the survey response pages to enable faster publishing. We also launched a new in-app customer onboarding process to guide all users step-by- step through video collection, editing, gallery design, and sharing processes.

Revised onboarding checklist

• Step 1 takes you to build a new Video Collector.
• Step 2 takes you to get some responses.This 5-step checklist is intuitive and guides users towards getting the most out of Vocal Video.Quick publish capabilities - now, when you receive a response, you can publish your auto-draft at the same time you view your response.

v37, released July 1st, 2022

With V37, we launched a set of 9 brand new Use Case pages including more details on how customers use Vocal Video in the following ways:

• Video Testimonials
• Video Reviews
• Video Marketing & UGC
• Remote Interviews & Employee Stories
• Team & Leadership Videos
• Video Ads & Social Commerce
• Sales Enablement
• Event Videos & Promotion

An overview page links to the top use cases, along with live customer examples. These pages also include information about Vocal Video integrations such with Google, Dropbox, Slack, BigCommerce, Airtable, Greenhouse, Klaviyo, and more. 

v35, released April 20th, 2022 With v35, we pushed a major release designed to make it easy to create beautiful Galleries of videos, and highlight key quotes from video transcripts. We also folded in analytics for every published video.

• Galleries: Galleries are collections of published videos that can be embedded to a website or shared via a public page. There are 5 types of Galleries: Wall of Love, Carousels, Slideshows, Grids, and Lists.
• Cards: Responsive embeds that can be customized to feature the video and a highlighted quote side-by-side. There are 10 Card designs to choose from. Each Card’s colors, fonts, corners, shadows, thumbnails, and size can be edited to match existing website layout and branding. Cards can be embedded separately, or used to build Galleries.
• Video Stats: Every published video and gallery now shows statistics about Views and Plays. You can also see the date of the last view of a video.

v34, released January 6, 2022

• Redesigned account dashboard & navigation (watch guide)
• In-app support widget
• Searchable help center
• White-labeled video collectors for Pro & Enterprise plans

v33, released November 20, 2021

• New Starter Annual plan
• Per-hour video storage pricing

v32, released November 14, 2021

• Updated video player with support for custom branding, keyboard controls, timeline thumbnails, and more. (details here) 
• Popover option for embedded videos and streamlined embed builder
• Updated Terms of Use

v31, released August 20, 2021

• Automatically detect aspect ratio of response videos and match that in draft videos.
• Under-the-hood improvements to video rendering to support highlight-reel videos with more video clips, and longer videos.
• More human-readable file names for individual response clips.
• Update video collectors to better support iOS 15.
• Various minor bug fixes.

v30, released August 7, 2021

• Added support for uploading external video clips.   You can now add animated logos, B-roll footage, external responses not collected by Vocal Video, and much more as video scenes and include them in your published Vocal Videos. More details here.
• Enhancements to adding video scenes and copying video scenes.
• Search and filter for responses and external video clips.

v29, released June 25, 2021

• Introduced new Starter plan.   More info on current plans here and a detailed plan comparison here.

v28, released June 5, 2021

• Enterprise and Professional customers can now use Custom Data fields to include additional information beyond the regular form fields in the Video Collector. More details here.
• Response pages redesigned
• Increased video rendering speed

v27, released May 28, 2021

With v27, we added fine-grained controls for adjusting speaker audio and soundtrack settings, as well as a library of 45 vetted templates for capturing video testimonials including example questions, email copy, and customer use cases.

Audio Normalization and Adjust Soundtrack Dynamically are both options that are selected and applied in the publishing process. Scene by scene audio edits can be previewed in the Vocal Video Editor.

• Vocal Video Audio Normalization: By default, we now only normalize the loudness of the people speaking in your videos.
• Adjust Soundtrack Dynamically: If you'd like to make sure your video's soundtrack doesn't sound too loud when people are speaking, you can enable our "Adjust Soundtrack Dynamically" option, which will include the soundtrack in the audio normalization process.
• Scene by scene volume controls: You can now adjust volume for each video or audio scene, which can be particularly helpful in creating compilation videos or highlight reels.

Our brand new library of 45 video testimonial templates, including example questions, email copy and examples from Vocal Video customers, is now available to browse and create within your Vocal Video account.

v26, released April 29, 2021

v26 was all about increasing the ease and quality of sharing the videos you publish with Vocal Video. We see customers regularly embedding their content on the websites, blogs, and landing pages and sharing via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram as well as community platforms like Slack, and this release just makes that even easier and more elegant.

• Design improvements to Vocal Video published video pages. (These pages include the video and transcript, like this one.)
• One-click video sharing to social media channels
• Improved Embed Builder, including new visual options. Details on how to use the Embed Builder here.

v25, released April 6, 2021

In v25 we made significant improvements to the Vocal Video Editor, including performance enhancements for creating Highlight Reels.

v24, released March 23, 2021

We're happy to announce that in v24 we've enabled video collector support in Safari on Mac OS. We've been able to make this change because Apple has (finally) added support for the industry-standard in-browser video & audio recording technology that our video collector experience depends on.

In addition, Apple has made strides in supporting these open standards in iOS and iPadOS. Thanks to that, your subjects can now record audio responses on mobile devices and tablets, in addition to desktop platforms where this was already possible. This means Vocal Video collectors now work seamlessly with ALL major browsers, across all categories of devices -- mobile, desktop, and tablet. And most of the niche browsers like Opera, Brave, etc work great as well.

Here's what else you'll see in v24

• Video collectors now supported on Safari desktop
• Subjects can now record audio responses on mobile, across all browsers
• Improved video recording on iPad with portrait support
• Localized transcriptions: You can now set the transcription language for each of your Collectors in the Questions section. When a response is received, the subtitles will be automatically generated in the chosen supported language. We currently offer English (United States), English (United Kingdom), Chinese (Simplified), German, French (Canada), French (France), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Spain), and Spanish (Latin America)

v23, released March 5, 2021

In v23 we released a much-requested capability for Professional and Enterprise users: the ability to include a custom video release or waiver in the collection experience. You can read more on the details here.

Additionally, all Vocal Video customers will now have the ability to personalize their Collectors with our new URL builder so that subjects do not need to fill out their contact information. You can read more about this here.

• New feature: ability to upload custom click-through video releases to Video Collectors
• Personalized invitation URL builder

v22, released February 15, 2021

With v22, all Vocal Video customers can create and customize thumbnails for each of their videos. This makes our ad-free hosting and embedding even more powerful, and puts important creative control with a simple interface in the hands of all users.

• New Thumbnail Builder available in the Vocal Video Editor, with 10 suggested thumbnails per clip
• Ability to upload custom thumbnails
• Collector template directory improved for easier browsing
• Referral program expanded and improved

v21, released January 19, 2021

• Brand new explainer video now on homepage
• Vocal Video Knowledge Base released
• Resources design and navigation refresh
• Improved full frame capture recording

Released: January 11, 2021

v20 Vocal Video now allows you to have more choice and control over the visibility of the videos that you publish.   All videos by default are published as public.   Public videos are ones that have their own unique URL for sharing, can be embedded on a blog or website, and are indexed by search engines like Google.

Now, with a paid subscription plan, you can set the desired visibility on a video by video basis when you publish or set the default visibility behavior for all your videos at the account level in the settings section of the application.

In addition to public visibility, you can choose from unlisted or private visibility options.   Unlisted videos are videos where you still may want to share them with colleagues or embedded them on your site or blog, but you do not want them to be indexed by search engines.   Private videos have no public URL and can't be embedded or accessed, unless logged into the Vocal Video application.

Vocal Video Referral Program

We just announced our referral program.   Please spread the love!   Tell a friend about Vocal Video and we'll happily give you a $100 Amazon gift card and your friend will receive $100 off their Vocal Video annual subscription.   It's a win win!    More details of the program can be found here.

Released: November 20, 2020

v18 Vocal Video now offers a complete video marketing platform from start to finish - including the critical ability to embed videos in your website or blog with ad-free hosting and remove watermark from videos.

Video marketing often involves time-intensive and expensive touch points with multiple employees, agencies and software vendors. With our new release of ad-free video hosting and video embeds, you can now collect, edit, publish and embed new testimonial videos with ad-free hosting with one simple solution: Vocal Video.

Here’s a complete list of the brand-new features you’ll now find in your Vocal Video account:

Video embeds and ad-free video hosting

Perhaps the most important step in your journey of creating brand new video content is sharing it with your audiences. We’ve made it easy to grab the embed code from each video and seamlessly drop it into your website or blog. The video hosting is also included, so no need to pay for expensive new software to host your videos, or deal with ads on Youtube and Vimeo.

Remove watermark from videos

Paid subscription plans all now have the ability to remove the watermark from published videos. Vocal Video branding can be toggled off for video collectors as well in Professional plans. (Plan breakdown here.)

Redesign of the Dashboard

The most arresting change you’ll notice logging into Vocal Video is the updated design of the user dashboard when you first log into the application. For new users, a short video tour of the application is available as well as a checklist of the critical first steps to launching a video collector and creating new videos from customers, influencers and more. Brand-new video tutorials take you through the basics as well as advanced features. Video drafts and the Collector Builder are easily accessible from the first page.

Activity Feed

You’ll see on the right a running feed of all activity highlights in your account from all users. New responses and automatically created video drafts, new users, and new published videos are all now highly visible.

Mobile friendly

Collecting videos has been seamless with the Vocal Video Collector since day one. In this release you’ll notice a much more mobile friendly experience in the video editing and publishing experience as well.