--- title: VoiceThread Product Roadmap --- [Skip to content](https://learn.voicethread.com/roadmap#main-content) [![VT Logo\_white](https://learn.voicethread.com/hs-fs/hubfs/VT%20Logo_white.png?width=280&height=194&name=VT%20Logo_white.png "VT Logo_white")](https://learn.voicethread.com?hsLang=en) - Products - [K-12](https://learn.voicethread.com/k12?hsLang=en) - [Higher Ed](https://learn.voicethread.com/highered?hsLang=en) - [Business](https://learn.voicethread.com/business?hsLang=en) - [Personal](https://learn.voicethread.com/personal?hsLang=en) - Solutions - [Health Sciences Education](https://learn.voicethread.com/health-sciences-education?hsLang=en) - [Visual Arts Education](https://learn.voicethread.com/visual-arts?hsLang=en) - [Business Education](https://learn.voicethread.com/business-education?hsLang=en) - [STEAM Ed](https://learn.voicethread.com/steam-ed?hsLang=en) - [Language Learning](https://learn.voicethread.com/language-learning?hsLang=en) - [Performing Arts](https://learn.voicethread.com/performing-arts?hsLang=en) - [Theology and Religious Studies](https://learn.voicethread.com/theology-and-religious-studies?hsLang=en) - About - [Blog](https://voicethread.com/blog/) - [Research](https://voicethread.com/research/) - [Jobs](https://voicethread.com/careers/) - Learning - [AI & Academic Integrity](https://learn.voicethread.com/voicethread-and-ai?hsLang=en) - [AI & Learning Science](https://learn.voicethread.com/principles-of-learning?hsLang=en) - [RSI - Real and Substantive Interaction](https://learn.voicethread.com/solutions/substantive-interaction-by-design?hsLang=en) - [Free workshops](https://learn.voicethread.com/free-workshops?hsLang=en) - [VT Certification](https://voicethread.com/vce) - [Digital Library](https://voicethread.com/library) - [Accessibility](https://learn.voicethread.com/accessibility?hsLang=en) - [How to](https://voicethread.com/howto/) - [Contact](https://voicethread.com/support/contact/) - [Register](https://voicethread.com/register/) - [Sign in](https://voicethread.com/login/) ![undefined](https://learn.voicethread.com/hs-fs/hubfs/undefined.webp?width=544&height=340&name=undefined.webp "undefined") # VoiceThread Roadmap 2026-27 Updated October 2026 Ask anyone about the most important moment in their learning and they'll give you a name. A teacher, a coach, a classmate who said the right thing, at the right time and in the right way. Human connection isn't a side effect of learning, it's the engine of it. VoiceThread has spent twenty years building a place for that kind of connection, and that's still the whole point. With the arrival of AI in the learning landscape, we, like everyone, are forced to recognize it as an environmental reality and design around the [cognitive risks it brings with it](https://learn.voicethread.com/principles-of-learning?hsLang=en). We will not be adding AI to conversations to cheaply replicate human presence. Instead, we'll focus on making real human conversation easier to see, hear, and share. When a student explains their thinking out loud, pointing at the thing they're talking about, [something wonderful happens](https://voicethread.wistia.com/s/bub98wxr15t87hj?wtime=11m29s) - AI's presence in their learning process becomes essentially irrelevant. No surveillance required. This roadmap is our current plan to make authentic human interactions a more commonplace experience for students everywhere. Items move between sections as we learn from your feedback and from real usage, and we'll refresh it each quarter. ## Recently shipped   ### Browser-native screen recording Record your screen within any modern browser. No separate app, no download. ### Rubrics Build, use, and reuse rubrics in VoiceThread. Grade against them directly in the quick grader, with results flowing to your LMS gradebook. ### Activity status in your gradebook Your LMS gradebook now shows where each student is (Started, In Progress, Submitted, Completed) before you've graded anything, so you can see participation without opening VoiceThread. ### Postcard view, back and better The postcard view has returned and it's much improved. Navigate large sets of slides easily, and it now works while you're recording a comment, so you can casually hop around in large media collections as you make compare and contrast comments. Comment notification nibs now let you know where all the comments are, both heard and unheard. ### Accessibility Accessibility work ships continuously, and 2026 closed several items in our ACR: - Corrected roles and state announcements for screen readers in the Assignment Builder, and full keyboard navigation through comment threads (April 2026) - Programmatic names for slide media and play/pause controls, so assistive technology announces what each control does (June 2026) - Collapsed comment channels are now exposed to assistive technology rather than hidden from it (June 2026) - Two fixes reported by an institutional accessibility team: slide descriptions are read aloud even when the slide has audio attached, and the comment channel behaves predictably for screen reader users when it's collapsed (October 2026) Among the items still open on the ACR and planned: user control over keyboard shortcuts (2.1.4) and caption styling controls (7.1.4), which will be built together and are listed under Next below. Our full remediation roadmap, criterion by criterion with targets, is published at [learn.voicethread.com/accessibility-roadmap](https://learn.voicethread.com/accessibility-roadmap?hsLang=en). ### VoiceThread Courses If you are a single instructor working alone, a coach, workforce trainer, or small teaching business, you can now build a complete course environment without an LMS at all. Modules, sequenced assignments, a student gallery, a quick grader, and course analytics can now all be built and run directly within VoiceThread. A number of these course improvements will impact LMS integrated licenses as well, with a newly built course page that makes the VoiceThreading work in your course more easily navigable for students. ## Now   In development and shipping this fall and winter. ### Course and VoiceThread cloning After a round of improvements this summer, clones now carry slide descriptions, rubric grading, and peer-review links intact. In development now: clone courses and groups from inside VoiceThread rather than only from the LMS, and choose exactly which VoiceThreads and assignments come along. Bringing a cloned course back into your LMS as an importable package is planned to follow. ### Add slides where you want them New slides have always landed at the end of a VoiceThread, and you moved them afterward. Soon you'll choose the spot first: at the end, at the beginning, or right after the slide you're on. ### Doodling - drawing while you talk, redesigned Annotating images, videos, documents, or presentation slides *while* you speak is the thing VoiceThread does that nothing else does. There is evidence that this is a valuable cognitive activity. A study from Susan Goldin-Meadow's lab at the University of Chicago, found that learners retain and generalize more when speech and gesture arrive together than when they arrive one after the other ([Congdon et al., 2017](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2017.03.005)). We're rebuilding the drawing toolkit to make it more readily accessible and to encourage more people to "talk with their hands." ### Captions in whatever language the class speaks Automatic captions currently transcribe in your institution's default language. An update, now in testing, detects and uses the spoken language on its own, so a Spanish section and a French section at an English-default institution both get captions that make sense within the local working context. ### Accessibility, continued The Manager, the admin area for your license, is being rebuilt and is in QA now. It has proper structure and names for every control, so the whole interface works with assistive technology. ### Faster media processing Infrastructure improvements to increase the speed of processing media files uploaded to your VoiceThreads. ### VT Chat A standard VoiceThread behaves like a presentation or video in that it starts at the beginning, or wherever you left off the last time you viewed it. A new VoiceThread setting allows you to invert that, and have the focus always land on the newest comment, creating a chat style conversation space. We think it might find some interesting new uses, e.g. an asynchronous office hour space that combines asynchronous efficiency of email, with the nuance and warmth of an in-person live office hour. We'll learn from how people use it before deciding whether Chat becomes its own kind of VoiceThread you can create from the start. ## Next   Planned for winter and spring 2027. Specs are written and these are queued behind the items above. ### Transcripts A full transcript of any VoiceThread conversation, organized by slide, with who said what and when. Useful for accessibility review, for students who want to revisit a discussion, and for anyone who needs the full conversation in text form. Transcripts are also the foundation for Bring Your Own AI, below. ### Text comments, with formatting VoiceThread is, unsurprisingly, voice first, but text comments are part of almost every VoiceThread conversation and they need to be, for many good (UDL + accessibility) reasons. They're getting a real editor, with bold, italics, bulleted and numbered lists, and links with readable anchor text instead of raw URLs. We're choosing the editor with keyboard and screen reader use as a foundational selection requirement.  ### Group Assignments Assign one piece of work to a group of students instead of to each individual. Groups build a VoiceThread together, and you grade the group once. In active development now, with the first release built around groups you create in VoiceThread. ### Comment Replace Re-record a comment and swap it in place, keeping its position in the conversation. Seems like a small thing, but it's a big relief for anyone who has ever flubbed a take or wants to create a template splainer VoiceThread that they can clone and then rerecord an intro comment into it, in order to customize it. This fits our mission goals of enabling real human warmth + efficiency. ### Audio description for uploaded video Add audio description tracks to video you upload, so described video works in VoiceThread the same way captions do. ### Caption styling Viewer controls for caption font, size, and color, built alongside user control over keyboard shortcuts. ### Bring Your Own AI Institutions increasingly have their own AI tools and their own policies about them. Rather than putting AI inside VoiceThread, we're designing a door: a secure, permissioned way for an institution's own tools to read VoiceThread conversations, so you can summarize, analyze, or archive them under your rules, not ours. The core product stays exactly as human as it is today. ## Exploring   Ideas we're researching to gauge interest. Nothing here is a commitment. Items move up when you tell us they matter, and some will drop off. ### A library of ready-made assignments There are maybe twenty structurally different ways to build a great VoiceThread assignment. We want to give you those as starting points you can adapt, so you spend your time teaching rather than configuring. ### Email-based sharing Share a VoiceThread with someone by email address, whether or not they have an account yet. ### Independent research on voice-based discussion We're working with outside researchers on evidence for what spoken, asynchronous discussion does for learning. Any data used is opt-in, consented by the students involved, de-identified, and never sold. If your institution wants to be part of this, tell us. ### Media hotspots Clickable regions on a slide that open a link or jump to another slide. ### Exports, rethought Getting your content and conversations out of VoiceThread in useful shapes: for archiving, for portfolios, and for institutional systems. ## Where we stand on AI There is no AI replicating human presence in a VoiceThread conversation, and there won't ever be. Nothing in VoiceThread will write a comment for a student, clean up the ums and ahs, or provide feedback to students that pretends to be you. Authentic human interaction is the whole point of the product and it's worth more in 2027 than it was in 2020. What we will do is make VoiceThread work well with, and next to, the AI tools your institution has already chosen. Transcripts make the conversation legible to those tools. Bring Your Own AI gives them a permissioned way in, under your policies. You decide what happens with your students' words. We'll just focus on making sure that the humans in a conversation are just that, humans. More on how we think about this: [The arrival of AI in the learning environment](https://learn.voicethread.com/principles-of-learning?hsLang=en). ## How we prioritize Four things decide what moves up this list. **Your feedback.** Feature requests, support conversations, and what we hear in training sessions and demos. **Pedagogical value.** Does it produce more substantive human interaction, or just document that interaction happened? **Evidence.** What the research says works, and what our own usage data says you actually use. **Foundation.** Some items are here because future items depend on them. We also time releases to the academic calendar. Features meant for fall adoption ship by July; features meant for spring ship by December.  Have an opinion about any of this? We'd like to hear it. [Email us](mailto:support@voicethread.com) This roadmap reflects our current plans and will change as we learn. 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