Narration and Captions: Making Your Video Watchable

Overview

Once your visuals are configured, how your video sounds and reads matters just as much. Long Stories gives you control over narrator voice, music, and captions — three elements that determine whether your video feels polished or unfinished.

Voiceover: With Voice vs Without Voice

With Voice

Long Stories generates narration from your script or prompt using a selected voice.

What you can control:

• Narrator voice — change from the universe default if needed
• Accent — choose regional accents that fit your audience
• Custom voice — use a cloned or uploaded voice on supported plans
• Script language — generate narration in languages other than English

Use "With voice" for: any content where narration is part of the story — animated series, explainers, story shorts, educational content.

Without Voice

The video generates with visuals and optional sound effects — but no spoken narration.

Use "Without voice" for:

• Videos where you'll record and add your own voiceover after export
• Music-only content
• Situations where you're testing visuals before adding audio

For beginners, "With voice" is the better starting point. It gives you the complete Long Stories experience and lets you evaluate narration quality from day one.

Changing the Narrator Voice

Even inside a universe (which has a default narrator), you can override the voice for a specific video:

1. In the voiceover settings panel, locate the narrator voice selector.
2. Browse available voices and click to preview.
3. Choose the voice, accent, or custom voice if want for the video.

The universe narrator stays unchanged — you're just overriding it for this one video.

Custom Voices (Premium Feature)

Adding custom voices is available on Plus ($25/mo) and above.

• Plus & Pro: add up to 3 voices
• Creator: add up to 10 voices
• Studio: add up to 20 voices
• Use any voice from ElevenLabs

Custom voices are powerful for brand consistency — using the same voice across all videos makes your channel instantly recognizable.

Captions

Captions display your script text as on-screen subtitles, synced to the narration.

Why captions matter:

• A large portion of social media video is watched on mute — captions keep those viewers engaged
• They improve accessibility for viewers with hearing impairments
• They can also help sync visual scenes to specific spoken lines

How to enable:

• Find the captions toggle in the settings panel before generating
• Turn it on — this embeds captions into the video output

Recommendation: Turn captions on by default for any content you plan to post publicly. They consistently improve watch time and accessibility without downside.

Quick Settings Reference

Updated on: 16/03/2026