Storyline's 2025 Year In Review
🎉 Wrapping up 2025 with a grateful (and honestly pretty tired) smile. It’s been a big year for Storyline 360, so I wanted to share a few highlights before we close the book. This year was about making Storyline more helpful in very real, practical ways, not just adding shiny features for the sake of it. A few things I’m especially proud of: 🚀 AI started pulling its weight This wasn’t about slapping a chatbot into the product. We focused on tangible wins that save time and reduce friction. Things like high-quality text-to-speech, automatic captions for audio and video, AI-generated alt text, image generation, and even quiz question generation. These are the kinds of tasks that used to slow authors down but should now feel easy or even trivial. We also introduced AI-generated JavaScript entrance animations, which might look like a small feature on the surface, but it’s actually a big deal for the future of AI in Storyline. We reworked how the AI Assistant chat works and laid the foundation for a whole new wave of AI-powered features. In 2026, we’re excited to keep pushing this further, helping you create objects and triggers, sync things on the timeline, and design better, more interactive courses without needing to be a power user on day one. ♿ Accessibility made meaningful progress The new Accessibility Checker, better screen reader support, Set Focus triggers, and captioning improvements were all driven directly by customer feedback. There’s still more to do, but this year delivered real improvements that authors and learners can feel. 🎨 More expressive interactivity and design tools Fluid morph transitions, new emphasis animations, shape merging, and a new JavaScript API opened up a lot of creative space. Courses don’t have to feel static anymore, and we’re seeing authors do some really impressive things with these tools. 🎥 Media just works better now We made some investments in media support this year for cleaner caption workflows, better playback reliability, and fewer weird edge cases. We also snuck in support for WebM, which enables videos with transparent backgrounds and unlocks some really fun design possibilities. A lot of unglamorous work here, but it makes a big difference day to day. 🛠️ A mountain of fixes and polish Hundreds of quality-of-life improvements landed this year. Some tiny, some massive, all aimed at making the authoring experience smoother and more predictable. None of this happens without customers pushing us, questioning us, and telling us when something feels off. That feedback keeps us honest, so please keep it coming. If you’ve used any of these features, I’d genuinely love to hear what’s working for you and what still feels rough. Tell me straight. What helped the most this year, and where did we miss? Here’s to an even better 2026!Themes Automatically Applied to AI-Generated Content
Background / Problem We understand that fonts and colors can be changed via Theme, but for content created with AI, we currently have to manually reapply the same settings each time. To align with unified brand design (fonts/colors/button and interaction styles, etc.), post-generation adjustments are required, increasing operational effort. In other projects, we duplicate content saved as design templates, but we cannot launch Create new with AI from existing content. This prevents us from combining template-driven workflows with AI generation efficiently. Request (Desired Behavior) Theme templating Allow saving and managing Theme settings (fonts, color palettes, button styles, default cover/lesson layouts, etc.) as “Theme Templates.” Enable setting a “default Theme Template” at workspace/folder/project levels. Integration with AI generation When using Create new with AI to generate a course, provide an option (default ON/OFF) to automatically apply the selected Theme Template. Allow launching Create new with AI from existing template content and inherit that content’s theme settings for the newly generated course. Bulk apply / reapply Provide a function to bulk apply or reapply (diff-based update) a Theme Template to existing courses. Offer impact previews (fonts, colors, component styles) and before/after comparisons prior to applying changes. Management / sharing Support versioning, ownership, update history, and team sharing (view/edit permissions) for Theme Templates. Support export/import (e.g., JSON) to facilitate migration across workspaces and backups. Expected Benefits Immediately achieve brand-consistent courses after AI generation, greatly reducing rework. Improve consistency of design standards across teams/organizations, enabling scalable production. Combine template operations with AI generation to balance speed and quality. Representative Use Cases Roll out brand-approved fonts and color schemes across multilingual courses. Apply a unified theme to large volumes of microlearning for Sales/Support. Launch Create new with AI from an existing template: let AI handle structure and tone, while the visual design remains fixed by the template. Acceptance Criteria (Examples) At the start of Create new with AI, users can select which Theme Template to apply (default sourced from workspace settings). After generation, users can reapply the Theme Template to the course with one click. Items manageable via Theme Template: fonts (body/headings), color sets (primary/secondary/accent), component styles (buttons/links/cards), and default layouts for cover/lessons. Template sharing settings and version history are visible. Note (Alternative) As a minimum improvement, allowing Create new with AI to be launched from existing content and inherit that content’s theme settings would already deliver significant value. Thank you for your consideration.AI content creation with customized design template
I recently tried out the AI content creation feature and was impressed that it can generate a solid structure, even though it's not perfect. My question is: I use a consistent design template across my other courses (fonts, colors, etc.), but I can't figure out how to apply this template to content created with AI. Does anyone know how to do this?Articulate 360 User Guides are Moving!
Hey, everyone! As we get ready to say goodbye to 2025 and hello to 2026, we're setting you up for even greater success in the new year. In the next few weeks, we’re moving the user guides you know and love in ELH over to our other documentation database in Product Support! That means you’ll soon have a “one-stop shop" for all of your Articulate 360 documentation needs. This change will also improve the accuracy and responsiveness of Artie, our AI support agent. (Did you know you can ask Artie to find documentation for you instead of searching?) Unifying our databases enables us to analyze usage more deeply so we can better tailor our documentation to meet your needs. Plus, it gives us more options for translating user guides into other languages to serve our global community. Once everything has been transferred, the directories for the individual user guides you depend on (and may have bookmarked), like those for Storyline 360 and Rise 360, will remain available in ELH for your convenience. When you follow the links to the individual articles, they’ll take you to the Product Support knowledge base. We'll have landing pages for each Articulate 360 product there as well. We have a few more things to put in place before flipping the switch, but the transition should be seamless for you when it happens in the next few weeks. Let us know if you have any concerns or questions in the meantime.Closed Caption issues with AI Text to Speech
Hi all I am loving the new AI Text to Speech voices but have found an issue with the Closed Captions. The Closed Caption placeholders are not lining up or splitting where expected. Image 1 is how the closed captions are displaying for the voice to text. Image 2 or 3 are both examples of how I would expect the captions to display, with the placeholders aligned to speech. Either of these would be acceptable. Is anyone else experiencing this? Not sure if this is a bug or an enhancement request or if I'm missing something? Thanks all! Niki StoylesIntroducing AI Chat + JavaScript Entrance Animations
Now you can chat with AI to generate simple JavaScript animations for your slide, making it easier to bring your ideas to life. Update to the latest version to give it a try and let us know what you think! To help you get started, we have a video walkthrough, a tutorial course, and documentation to learn more about how it works, see sample prompts, and animation examples that can all be found here. Why JavaScript? This update is our first step in helping authors experiment and push creative boundaries. Based on your feedback, we’re already working on support for built-in animations—and we’ll be sharing a preview soon! We’re also exploring more ways AI can handle tedious tasks for you, so let us know what you’d like AI Assistant to be able to do for you! Try It Out! Use AI Chat to make an object fly in from the right side of the screen after one second. Feel free to get creative—frisbee flying across a park? Plane flying across a cloudy sky? Sky's the limit (see what we did there?)! Share your example in the comments below!
