Voice, Music, and Captions: Making Your Video Watchable

Overview

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

Voiceover: With Voice vs Without Voice

With Voice

LongStories narrates your video with AI voices, generated from your script or idea.

What you can control:

• Narrator voice — change from the universe default for any single video.
• Script language — generate narration in languages other than English.
• Custom voice — import any voice from ElevenLabs on paid plans.

Use With Voice for any content where narration carries the story: animated series, explainers, story shorts, educational content.

Without Voice

The video generates as a silent video — visuals with no narration. Background music and sound effects are separate settings, so those can still be included.

Use Without Voice for:

• Videos where you'll record and add your own voiceover after export
• Testing visuals before you care about audio

For beginners, With Voice is the better starting point. It gives you the complete LongStories experience and lets you judge narration quality from day one.

Changing the narrator voice

Even inside a universe with a default narrator, you can pick a different voice for a specific video:

1. In the Voiceover step, open the narrator voice picker.
2. Browse and preview voices — they're grouped by language, and you can search by name, style, or accent.
3. Pick one. The universe's default narrator stays unchanged — you're only overriding it for this video.

Two notes:

• Character dialogue doesn't use the narrator voice — each character speaks with their own assigned voice. To change a character's voice, edit the character on the Characters page.
• Some universes lock the narrator: the universe owner decides whether viewers can pick their own voice at generation time.

Custom voices

On paid plans you can import voices from ElevenLabs — up to 3 (Plus/Pro), 10 (Creator), or 20 (Creator Max/Studio). Paste a voice's share link into the Add a custom voice section of any voice picker and it's immediately usable for your narrator or characters.

Custom voices are powerful for brand consistency — the same voice across all your videos makes your channel instantly recognizable. Full walkthrough: Adding Your Own Voice from ElevenLabs.

Background music

Background music is a universe-level setting: open your universe's settings and find the Music section.

• Include Background Music — when enabled, every video generated in the universe includes the selected track.
• Background Track — pick from the library, or upload your own tracks and they'll appear under "Your Tracks".
• Volume — keep it low (around 0.1 is recommended) so the music sits under the narration instead of competing with it.

Because it's set on the universe, all episodes in a series share the same musical identity — one more thing that keeps a channel feeling consistent.

Captions

Captions display your narration as on-screen subtitles, synced to the voice and embedded into the video output.

Why captions matter:

• A large share of social video is watched on mute — captions keep those viewers engaged.
• They make your content accessible to viewers with hearing impairments.

How to enable: turn on the Captions toggle in More Settings before generating. Universe owners can also set the caption position (top, center, or bottom) in the universe's settings.

Recommendation: captions on by default for anything you post publicly. They consistently improve watch time and accessibility with no real downside.

Quick settings reference

Updated on: 11/08/2026