The Stories feature of Instagram is one the most popular features of the platform. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing social media platform wants to make the feature more engaging to attract the user pool. It has now announced to introduce a new sticker to Stories. It is an auto-captioning sticker. The feature will allow users to add captions. It will make captioning easier. The captions will be auto-generated to the videos. The feature is limited to English-speaking users. The new feature is seen as a fulfillment of long demand by users. It will help especially users who are deaf or having issues in the hearing. Such users who are not native English speakers had to watch videos minus sound.
Instagram said that there is an edit option as well. The edit option lists the words of the captions separately. Users can make adjustments with the words. They require just tapping on the individual words. The company said that it is just like other text options in Stories. Users can also adjust the style and color of the words in captions. There is also an option to edit the words to correct spelling. It noted that auto-captions lack perfect accuracy. This is because of the different accents or atypical speech. Therefore, an option to edit individual words will minimize the error in captions. Auto captioning features are becoming very popular in recent times. Several platforms like Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams have already incorporated options for automated captions for videos.
Instagram noted that adding an auto-captioning sticker to Stories will make the feature more efficient and inclusive to watch. There is no option available for now to highlight text for better visual contrast. However, this can be done using the Draw tool behind the captions. Instagram added that soon the product team will begin testing the auto-captioning feature in Reels. Reels allows users to make short funny videos and share them on Instagram. Notably, captions have been available to Instagram’s standalone video application IGTV. Google introduced the feature for Live Captioning to the Chrome browser in March this year. Popular Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok added has automatic captions for American English and Japanese in April.
