Instagram is adding AI-powered automatic captions to IGTV, for people watching with the sound turned off.
This is something that will make many social media managers and content creators very happy. Starting last week, Instagram will automatically add captions to your IGTV videos when a user starts watching with the sound off.
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Most social media platforms agree that adding captions – or subtitles – to videos can increase view time by 10-15%. Captions are maybe one of the most important aspects of successful social media videos. And that’s because 85% of videos viewed on social are watched on mute.
To help with engagement, and probably boost the interest for its long-form video feature, Instagram announced that it will begin to add AI-powered automatic captions to videos on IGTV. The captions will only be visible to users watching videos on mute and they can control how and when they see them in their account settings.
The feature will start off in 16 languages worldwide.
Instagram explained, “Audio within Instagram videos is unique in that there are a variety of different languages, topics, acoustic conditions, cultural slang, and accents. Auto-captioning videos requires cutting-edge research and engineering to power the AI that we use in the process.”
It is not the first time Facebook uses AI to bring text to video. Back in November 2018, Instagram introduced automatic alternative text and custom alternative text to photos, to improve the experience for visually impaired people.