Instagram Tests a New Auto-Captions Feature for Stories
Recently, Instagram was spotted testing out a new “Captions” sticker that auto-generates captions. This new feature appears in the sticker tab. Just like any other sticker, you can add this one to any of your Stories with a video clip.
When you add this sticker to your Instagram Story, it will transcribe the audio in the video clip, thus generating captions automatically. Similar to regular text, users can change the font styles for captions in their story. This new feature is in its testing phase currently and is only available to select users. As of now, there is no information regarding when this feature will be rolled out for all users.
Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and industry commentator spotted this new feature and shared a video on Twitter, showing how it works. Once users record a video, they can tap on the stickers tab and choose the “Captions” sticker from there. After that, the feature will transcribe the audio in the video and generate captions for the same automatically. Once done, users will be able to see the captions as the video plays. You will also have multiple colors and four font style options to pick from for the captions.
According to the video Navarra shared, the captioning is fairly accurate and is expected to become more precise as the feature rolls out widely.
While Instagram’s new sticker is appearing for a small group of users, it seems like even they can’t upload Stories using it at the moment. Furthermore, according to reports, the company said that this new feature is not available widely for public testing just yet, meaning it could be because of a glitch that the sticker is showing up for some people.
Nevertheless, this feature is quite similar to what the platform is already offering in the Instagram Threads app. It would be undoubtedly helpful for users with hearing disabilities or those who are watching stories with their audio turned off. Moreover, it will also enable various new content formats for Instagram creators.
Last year, the social media giant launched a similar feature to its Threads app, which lets users add auto-captions to their videos. Users can remove, edit, move and place the caption wherever they want in the video. In addition to this, the app also censored or bleeped curse words while generating auto-captions. While the app didn’t quite do well for Instagram, heaps of users used this feature to create videos with automatically generated captions and posted them on their Stories and other video sharing apps. However, this feature has not been made available to all Instagram Threads users yet.
Wrapping It Up
Although Instagram has not made its new “Captions” sticker available for public testing, it is currently showing up for select users (perhaps due to some glitch). Nevertheless, the platform is expected to introduce this auto-captioning functionality to Instagram Stories in the next couple of months, considering it added auto-captions for IGTV videos last year in September. According to the company’s recent statement, this feature is being tested internally for the time being. It remains unknown as to when this feature will be rolled out for all users.