September 2026
Everything that reached general availability in Walnut in September 2026, with links to the full guide for each feature.
September 2026
September has been about serving many buyers from one demo, and about knowing what goes out before it goes out. One demo now carries a set of values per segment, templates can be commented on and approved before anyone can publish them, and a deck you already have becomes clickable screens.
Later in the month, AI Mode learned to re-skin a whole template to another brand, guide writing moved onto a single path, and Playlists and Deal Rooms picked up a large batch of authoring and control improvements.
There are also new controls over how narration sounds, what Insights tells you about lead capture, and how quickly you can rearrange a hub.
Closing out the month, narration keeps itself in step with your edits, gradient brand colours reach the demo editor, and the app's navigation is standardised. In the last week, the Walnut API started reporting on users and seats, the Walnut MCP let you run your account from Claude, admins could run Walnut's AI on their own provider keys, buyers can tell a playlist what matters to them before it plays, and Figma screens update from Figma without losing your edits.
Here's what we shipped this month 👇
- Demo Presets — one demo, a set of values per segment
- Review and approve demo templates, without leaving Walnut ⭐
- Import a presentation as clickable screens
- A pronunciation dictionary for Text to Speech ⭐
- Lead forms in Insights ⭐
- Voiceover speed controls ⭐
- Drag and drop content items in Playlists and Deal Rooms ⭐
- Hide the audio player
- A quieter editor topbar
- Re-skin a whole template to another brand ⭐
- One AI writer behind every guide
- Dynamic values in simulated typing ⭐
- A batch of authoring and control improvements for Playlists and Deal Rooms
- Re-sync voice-overs when a step's text changes
- Gradients in your demos ⭐
- A clearer way around the app
- Cleaner screens, per-link playback, and sharing from the player
- Private Vimeo links in Playlists and Deal Rooms
- User and seat analytics in the Walnut API ⭐
- Run your Walnut account from Claude with the Walnut MCP ⭐
- Bring your own key: run Walnut AI on your own LLM providers ⭐
- Let buyers shape a playlist with an Intent Survey ⭐
- Update Figma screens from Figma
⭐ = you asked for this on our public roadmap.
Demo Presets: One Demo, Every Segment
A demo with ten variables served to ten segments means a hundred values to define, keep straight, and redo every time the demo changes — today living in someone's spreadsheet, or in ten copies of the same demo quietly drifting apart.
Now you build one demo, define a set of values per segment, and switch between them on the link.
What you can do:
- Define a preset per segment — healthcare, retail, financial services — and switch between them on a published demo
- Manage your variables in one place: a global Variables surface in the Resource hub, shared across the team
- Promote a variable a template already uses to a company-wide one, and add a batch of variables to a preset in one go
- Describe a new segment in a sentence and let AI fill the whole set, logo and headshot included, in a form you can edit before saving
- Pick the segment on the pre-flight screen before you present, and see exactly what every field will say
- Let narration follow the variables, so the audio says the same names the screen does
- Or copy a link with a segment already applied and send it ahead of the meeting
The result:
Fix a screen once and every segment gets the fix.
Learn more about demo variables ›
Review and Approve Demo Templates, Without Leaving Walnut
⭐ You asked for this
Feedback on a template lived in a doc nobody opened, and nothing stood between a template and the buyer it was about to go out to.
Now you comment directly on an element, a screen or a whole template — and you can require an approval before anything is published.
What you can do:
- Leave comments anchored to the element you clicked, which survive that element changing
- Mention a colleague and reach them in Walnut and in their daily digest
- Read one review state everywhere — Draft, In review, Approved, Needs re-approval — on the library card, in the editor header, and in the library filter
- Let an edit to an approved template send it back for re-approval on its own, so nobody has to remember
- See review actions recorded on the version they happened on, so you know which version was approved and what has changed since
- See who can approve a blocked publish, and read the reviewer's reason where the creator will actually find it
Comments, mentions and notifications are simply there. Review states and the publish gate appear once an admin turns approval on for the account — until then, publishing works exactly as it does today.
The result:
Nothing ships before the person who has to sign off has signed off.
Import a Presentation: Turn a Deck into Clickable Screens
The deck that already tells your story had to be rebuilt screen by screen before it could live inside a demo.
Now you upload a .pptx or a .pdf and every slide becomes a Walnut screen.
What you can do:
- Import from the editor under Add → Import Presentation, or just ask the AI assistant to do it
- Pick the slides you want and send them to a new section or to an existing one
- Click through imported slides, guide them, and mix them with captured screens
- Keep your speaker notes — they come across as presenter notes
Slides are imported as images, so their text is not editable in Walnut. A PDF keeps fonts and emoji exactly as they look in your deck; a .pptx swaps any font we do not have.
The result:
The deck you already have becomes part of the demo.
A Pronunciation Dictionary for Text to Speech
⭐ You asked for this
Narration mispronounced the words that matter most — product names, acronyms, proper nouns — and getting it right meant a support ticket.
Now you tell Walnut how to say a word once. Write the word, add a plain-English respelling — Walnut → wall-nut — and narration says it correctly.
What you can do:
- Add and edit rules from the Text to Speech panel in the editor
- Respell a word, or record yourself saying it and pick from the pronunciations Walnut generates
- Preview a rule against any voice before you save it
- Apply rules across the whole workspace, in every language, including agent-generated and translated narration
- Set a priority so a longer, more specific rule wins over a shorter one
The result:
Your brand names sound like your brand names.
Lead Forms in Insights
⭐ You asked for this
If you embed demos with a lead form, Insights never told you which demos captured leads or which viewers submitted one. The data was already there — it just was not surfaced.
Now lead capture appears in Insights alongside everything else you track.
What you can do:
- Sort and filter the All demos list by lead form
- See a lead form badge on a demo's Insights page
- See who submitted, in the sessions table
The result:
You can tell which demos actually generate leads.
More on identifying viewers with lead forms ›
Voiceover Speed Controls
⭐ You asked for this
Narration ran at one pace, whether the step was a dense technical explanation or a one-line "click here".
Now you set the pace on any individual guide step.
What you can do:
- Pick from five options, Slower through Faster, next to the narrator voice in the narration panel
- Keep that choice in every language the step is translated into, including languages you add later
- Set it from AI Mode too
The result:
Pacing that matches the step instead of the demo.
Learn more about Text to Speech ›
Drag and Drop Content Items in Playlists and Deal Rooms
⭐ You asked for this
Moving a content item from one section to another meant deleting it in one place and re-adding it in the other.
Now you drag it.
What you can do:
- Move demos, images, videos and documents between any gallery or carousel section
- Drag across pages by hovering a page tab mid-drag — the canvas follows without dropping the item
- Keep comment threads attached to the item wherever it lands
The result:
Rearranging a hub takes as long as it looks like it should.
Hide the Audio Player
A narrated step carried a visible player control, even when all you wanted was the voice.
Now you can turn the player off for a template — the recording still plays, viewers just do not see the control.
What you can do:
- Set it once in the template's Guides settings, right under Autoplay media recordings
- Leave existing demos alone — the player stays on until you turn it off
The result:
Cleaner guide steps on narrated demos, without giving up the voiceover.
Learn more about Text to Speech ›
A Quieter Editor Topbar
The editor topbar now leads with the actions people actually use. Two things moved rather than disappeared:
- Version history sits behind the last-saved timestamp — the place you already look when the question is what changed, and when
- The help centre moved into the profile menu, alongside the rest of the account-level items
Re-skin a Whole Template to Another Brand
⭐ You asked for this
Reusing a template for a different customer meant hunting down every colour and every logo by hand, screen by screen, and hoping you caught them all.
Now you ask AI Mode to re-skin the template, and it proposes the whole mapping for you to approve.
What you can do:
- Let it read the template first — it ranks colours by how much of the screen they actually paint, and finds logos across screens even when each screen carries its own copy
- Choose how far it reaches: accents only, accents and surfaces, or everything. Buttons, links, icons, borders, backgrounds and body text are each in or out, and a run will not start until you have said which
- Review old-to-new swatch pairs and logo previews before anything changes, drop rows you do not want, or point it at the right mark if it picked wrong
- Include fonts and guide colour themes in the same pass
- Turn the logo and brand colours into variables instead of fixed values, so the template stays re-skinnable per demo, at publish or from a URL parameter
- Read back what it could not do — if a template's brand colours live only in unused stylesheet rules, it tells you the run changed nothing visible rather than reporting success
Anything it cannot confidently place is left alone.
The result:
One template becomes the template for every customer you demo to.
One AI Writer Behind Every Guide
Guides could be generated from Story Capture, from Compose with AI, or from AI Mode — and each path carried a different amount of context, so the same editor produced different quality depending on which button you pressed.
Now every path runs through one writer that reads the whole demo before it writes a word.
What you can do:
- Let it read everything first: every screen, the guides already there, and the voice narration from a Story Capture when there is one
- Answer one short question about what the guide is for, before any analysis begins
- Approve the plan before anything is written — it arrives as steps you can collapse, with Approve, Decline or Refine, and nothing lands until you say so
- Get steps that arrive styled, with a real title and body, an on-brand navigation button, and anchors the agent can correct rather than leaving a step pointing at nothing
- Improve an existing step with the steps either side of it in view, so a rewrite fits the narrative and keeps your annotation's own styling
The result:
Guide quality stops depending on where you started.
Dynamic Values in Simulated Typing
⭐ You asked for this
Simulated typing typed whatever was written when the demo was built, so a date on a form was wrong the moment the demo aged.
Now you can drop a dynamic date or a text variable into the text that types itself out.
What you can do:
- Insert a dynamic date so a field types today's actual date, character by character, as though it were hand-entered
- Insert a text variable so the typed value follows whatever the demo is personalised with
- Let the value resolve whenever the prospect opens the demo, rather than when it was built
The result:
A form that types the day your buyer is looking at it.
Playlists and Deal Rooms: A Batch of Authoring and Control Improvements
A single release brought thirteen changes to Playlists and Deal Rooms, split between building content and controlling who sees it. All of it works on the advanced Playlist as well as on Deal Rooms.
Building content:
- Comparison tables — configurable rows and columns, per-column widths, and background colour per cell, row or column. Spreadsheet-style throughout: Tab to move and add a row, right-click to insert, move or delete, drag to reorder columns, and drag-select a range to colour it
- Update an asset once, everywhere it is used — save a section to the library and edit it in one place. Draft rooms update immediately; published rooms get an "update available" banner instead of a silent rewrite, and saving asks whether to update the existing entry or save a new one
- Change a section's layout without rebuilding it — "Change section type" in both the section menu and its top bar, carrying your content across the switch
- External URLs as content — paste a share link instead of hunting for embed code, and embeds are named after their provider rather than "Embed Code Snippet"
- Richer text — inline images with resize, text background colour with a template-level default, and link colour. Turning text into a link no longer strips its formatting
- AI Mode gets scope and inputs — select a section and the agent works only on it, enforced rather than merely asked for in the prompt. It reads the room before changing background colours, and it accepts a PDF or an image as an input
Controlling access and change:
- Native email capture — one setting with four postures: a required gate, a skippable pop-up, or a quiet banner at the top or bottom
- Gate a page to specific viewers — a page can be hidden from everyone except named people, based on a verified email address rather than on the link itself
- Page gating survives copying — a copied Deal Room keeps its gates and allow-lists rather than silently publishing the page
- Version history for Deal Room edits — a change log plus snapshots. Restore a version, make a copy from one, or inspect it in a full-screen read-only view using the room's own branding
- Turn commenting off in a Deal Room — hides every commenting affordance while preserving existing threads, so they return if commenting is switched back on
Seeing what worked:
- Per-page engagement inside PDFs, so you can tell which pages were actually read
- Template adoption and performance on the Playlists analytics page, grouped by who used it
The result:
Playlists and Deal Rooms author like a document and lock down like a system of record.
Re-sync Voice-Overs: Narration That Keeps Up With Your Edits
Change the wording on a guide step and the narration recorded against the old wording is suddenly wrong. Nothing told you, so a demo could go out reading a sentence that is no longer on the screen.
Now Walnut marks a clip out of date the moment its step's text changes, and re-records it on request.
What you can do:
- See an "out of date" badge on the microphone as soon as a step's text no longer matches its narration
- Re-record every stale clip in the step with one click
- Keep each clip's original voice and speed through the re-record, rather than resetting to the defaults
- Read back exactly how many clips were refreshed, including when some fail, as in "Re-synced 2 of 3 clips"
The result:
The narration says what the step says, without you having to remember which ones you edited.
Learn more about Text to Speech ›
Gradients in Your Demos: The Same Brand Fill, Everywhere
⭐ You asked for this
Gradient brand colours arrived for Playlists and Deal Rooms earlier this year. Demos and demo templates were still limited to flat colours, so a brand built on a gradient stopped at the demo boundary.
Now gradients reach the demo editor, using the same fill picker and the same saved swatches.
What you can do:
- Give guide step backgrounds and buttons a gradient — set it at the workspace level in Brand Style settings, override it per template in the editor sidebar, or leave it inherited
- Give any captured element's background a gradient, the same way you would set a flat colour
- Pull from one swatch library across the whole app: brand, saved, stock and recent tiers are shared, so a gradient saved in a Playlist is waiting for you in the demo editor
Solid and Gradient are two tabs on the same control, and the flat colour stays underneath as a fallback, so anything that cannot paint a gradient degrades cleanly rather than breaking.
The result:
Save a gradient once and it is available everywhere you brand something.
A Clearer Way Around the App
As Walnut's settings have grown, every page picked up its own way of doing things. Filters lived in a different dropdown on each screen, and search moved depending on where you were.
Navigation is now standardised. This is the first step in a broader rollout.
What you can do:
- Use the left rail to pick an area, the top bar to see which screen you are on and its actions, and a single panel beside the content for that page's own sections
- Find filters in that panel on every page, as rows you add to, starting from a sensible default set
- Save views on Deals
- Find search in the same place, with the same behaviour, whichever page you are on
The result:
What you learn on one page is true on the next one.
Cleaner Screens, Per-Link Playback, and Sharing From the Player
A group of smaller changes to how demos are tidied, tuned and shared.
What you can do:
- Filter the storyline gallery and the editor's screens panel for screens that no link, guide or flow reaches, plus duplicate captures, then select and delete them in bulk. The filter appears only for people who can edit, and only once there is something to clean up
- Override autoplay, looping, narration and the delay between steps on an individual share link. A link inherits the demo's own settings by default, so existing links behave exactly as before
- Share a demo directly from the demo player
The result:
Less cleanup by hand, and one demo that can behave differently for different audiences without being duplicated.
Private Vimeo Links in Playlists and Deal Rooms
A Vimeo video shared by private link carries a privacy hash in its URL, and Playlists and Deal Rooms didn't accept links in that form.
Now you can paste a private Vimeo link with its privacy hash — either the vimeo.com/… share link or the player.vimeo.com/video/… player link — and the video plays.
The result:
Vimeo videos you share by private link sit in a hub alongside everything else.
User and Seat Analytics in the Walnut API
⭐ You asked for this
Proving that seats are being used, or planning the next licence purchase, meant asking us for a report.
Now you pull user activity and seat usage yourself, from the Walnut API or through the Walnut MCP.
What you can do:
- Use the Users endpoint to see each member's role, last login, and how many demos, templates and playlists they created in a date range
- Use the Seats endpoint to see total, used and remaining seats and pending invites, with a per-role breakdown on plans that count seats by role
- Ask the same questions in plain language through the Walnut MCP
- Generate and revoke your own API key from the Walnut API card on the Integrations page, without going through your account team
The result:
Seat and adoption numbers on demand, in whatever tool you report from.
Run Your Walnut Account from Claude with the Walnut MCP
⭐ You asked for this
Admin work in Walnut happened one screen at a time: checking seats before inviting a new team, inviting them one by one, tracking down everything a departing teammate owned before removing them, and renaming, tagging or archiving library items one at a time.
Now you connect the Walnut MCP to Claude and do it in a sentence — "Invite these 40 people as Viewers", "Offboard Alex and give their work to Jordan", "Archive every Demo in the Old Campaigns folder".
What you can do:
- Invite up to 100 people in one request, each with their own role. Walnut checks you have enough seats first, and invites nobody if you'd run short
- See pending invitations and when each one expires, cancel one to free its seat right away, and change someone's role — Claude tells you if the new role has no seats left
- Offboard someone in two steps: Claude first shows everything they own, then transfers all of it to the person you choose and removes their access
- Transfer ownership of a selection of items, or of everything one person owns
- Rename (including find and replace), move, tag, untag, archive and restore library items in bulk — up to 500 items in a single change
- See a preview of exactly which items will change and confirm before anything happens, with a warning if you're about to archive a Demo still used in a published Playlist or Deal room — naming each Playlist and Deal room still serving it, so you know where to look
- Ask about Demo analytics, compare Demo performance against your company benchmark, and look up users, seats and activity
- Ask how a Playlist is doing — its viewers, engagement and how each piece of content performs — and compare Playlists side by side
- Ask how a Deal Room is doing, including Mutual Action Plan progress and the status of its CRM deal, and compare Deal Rooms side by side
- Ask how a Playlist or Deal Room is shared: its expiration date, access code, who can open it, the email gate, allowed and blocked lists, and view email notifications
The Walnut MCP works with the same permissions you have in Walnut. Managing members and transferring ownership are limited to Account owners and Company admins, and any change needs the Full access level you approve when you connect — with Read-only, Claude can answer questions but can't change anything.
The result:
The admin work that used to take an afternoon of clicking takes one sentence and a confirmation.
Connect Walnut to Claude › · See everything the Walnut MCP can do ›
Bring Your Own Key: Run Walnut AI on Your Own LLM Providers
⭐ You asked for this
Every Walnut AI feature ran on Walnut's shared keys and drew down your Walnut AI credits — even when your company already had a contract with an LLM provider, or a policy that model traffic must run through your own tenant.
Now admins can route Walnut's AI through their own provider accounts, from the Provider keys tab in the AI Control Center.
What you can do:
- Connect a key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or xAI. Walnut verifies it with the provider before storing it, and only ever shows its last four characters
- Map each tier of AI work to a model your providers offer — a faster model for autocomplete, a stronger one for long-form writing — or leave a tier on Walnut default
- Choose what happens if your provider rejects a call: fall back to Walnut's model, or stop
- Choose whether Walnut keeps the prompt and response, or stores metadata only
- See who connected a key, remapped a tier or changed a policy in the change history
- Deactivate at any time — your keys, mappings and policy choices are kept for when you switch back
Tiers you map to your own provider don't consume Walnut AI credits; tiers left on Walnut default keep drawing credits as before. BYOK is available to admins on workspaces entitled to it — if you don't see the Provider keys tab, contact your Walnut account representative.
The result:
Walnut's AI runs on your contract, your models and your tenant.
Let Buyers Shape a Playlist with an Intent Survey
⭐ You asked for this
Covering different personas with a Choose Your Own Adventure playlist meant building a separate playlist for each one, or hoping each buyer found the sections that mattered to them.
Now buyers tell the playlist what matters before it plays.
What you can do:
- Open a playlist with an Intent Survey, where buyers rate each section as Highly important, Less important or Not relevant
- Let the playlist play the Highly important sections first and leave out the ones marked Not relevant, with a Change my ranking control if they change their mind mid-demo
- See what buyers prioritised in Playlist Insights — each viewer's top priority and what they said mattered, plus a roll-up of how viewers rated each section
The result:
One playlist that adapts to each viewer, instead of one playlist per persona.
Update Figma Screens from Figma
Screens imported from Figma froze at the moment of import. When the design changed, you had to import it again and rebuild the guides and annotations on top.
Now you update an imported screen from Figma and keep everything you added to it. The feature has moved from beta to general availability.
What you can do:
- Pick Update screen on a Figma-imported screen to re-read its frame, then review the update edit by edit before you commit it
- Point a screen at a different frame in the same file when the designer saved a new version alongside the old one
- Select several screens and click Update N screens from Figma to refresh them all at once, each from its own frame
The result:
Your demo keeps up with the design without losing the work you've put into it.