Instagram was born as a place where people could share photos in a square, 1:1 aspect ratio. But gone are those days.
The Meta-owned platform has become the most popular photo- and video-sharing social media on Earth. With it seeing more and more video contents being uploaded to the platform, there needs to be a way to improve experience when viewing and engaging with video contents.
And since Instagram users are so diverse, there needs to be a way for users to understand what are being spoken inside those videos.
This is where Instagram is introducing automatic captions to videos in its feed.
At first, the feature has been made available for users in "select" languages, but Instagram plans to expand it to more languages and countries.
Before this feature is introduced, users should manually add captions to their contents in the editing phase.
This time, users are no longer required to do that.
Instagram's auto-generated caption is powered by AI.
While it's certain that AI-generated captions won't be as good as captions that are added manually, Instagram is expecting the AI to "continue to improve" the more it learns.
“It’s a long time coming, but we’re excited to share a new tool that empowers those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities,” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri wrote on Twitter.
“Videos on Instagram will now have auto-generated captions, where you have the option to turn them off or on.”
Users can do this by heading to their advanced settings in the app and toggling the 'show captions' option.
It’s a long time coming, but we’re excited to share a new tool that empowers those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.
Videos on Instagram will now have auto-generated captions, where you have the option to turn them off or on. pic.twitter.com/DNyzcdiPSU— Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) March 1, 2022
According to Instagram, the feature is meant to make Instagram more accessible for those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.
For Instagram, this feature should make it able to reach the 5% of the world's population (466 million people) who have hearing issues.
Beyond that, the feature is also likely to be appreciated by users who browse the app with volume off.
Users do have the option to turn captions on or off.
At this time, the company confirmed that auto-generated captions are launching in 17 languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, German, Turkish, Russian, Thai, Tagalog, Urdu, Malay, Hindi, Indonesian and Japanese.
More languages should be added, Instagram said.
This kind of feature is similar to TikTok's auto-generated captions, which were introduced in April 2021, or YouTube's automatic captioning feature which has been around for more than a while.