Instagram feed videos now feature auto-generated captions—an accessibility boost for people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or prefer watching videos without sound.
“It’s a long time coming,” company CEO Adam Mosseri tweeted on Tuesday. “But we’re excited to share a new tool that empowers those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities.”
Instagram uses speech recognition technology to automatically create captions, which appear as text at the bottom of the screen. Users can visit Settings > Account > Captions to remove the transcript. It’s unclear exactly how to opt into automatic subtitles for your own video posts, though.
“We’ve noticed that our community has implemented time-consuming and labor-intensive ‘workarounds’ (burning-in captions on videos, outsourcing captioning work) in an effort to make their content more accessible for deaf and hard of hearing viewers,” an Instagram spokesperson told CNET. “Auto-generated captions on IG video will help people save time by spending less time captioning and more time creating amazing content.”
The new feature is currently available for English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Italian, German, Turkish, Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese, with more languages coming soon. As with any AI solution, the more people who use this captions feature, the better the results will be.
Instagram in May rolled out Stories captions in the form of an add-on sticker that automatically converts speech to text. While users may edit the style, position, and color of words, there is currently no way to highlight text for better contrast, and the function offers only a few font types.
Auto-generated captions aren’t exactly novel; most social networks have just been slow to introduce them. TikTok only just beat Instagram to the punch by launching a new subtitle feature last April. Zoom opened live closed captioning to all free users in October, while Twitter in December began offering automatic captions to mobile and web users.
