Instagram has been testing out a new feature over the past couple of weeks, one that should make captioning your content on the platform a whole lot easier. Now, the company has confirmed that the feature—in the form of a sticker—is officially available in “a handful of countries”, although this is reportedly limited to “English and English-speaking countries” for now.
Basically, if you’re in a supported country, you can now add automatic captions to your Instagram Stories, with support arriving for Reels in the future, too. Have a look at the short demo for a better idea on how it works:
It’s pretty straightforward: shoot a Story, and open stickers (where you’d add Location stickers, etc.), and choose “Caption”. You’ll also be able to tweak the look of the text to match the aesthetic of your style, while you’ll have the ability to edit any incorrectly spelt captions—which is bound to happen. As per The Verge, Instagram says that captions will make Stories (and eventually Reels) more inclusive to those who are deaf or hard of hearing; users who watch Stories without sound on should also appreciate this.
For now, the feature doesn’t appear to be available in Malaysia, and I don’t have a “Caption” sticker on either my iPhone or Android phone, so it looks like we aren’t classified as an English-speaking region by Instagram (true). However, the company says that it “hopes to expand soon”, so depending on the reception, we might eventually see automatic captions become available to local users, too.
This follows similar moves from folks over at Zoom, Google, and Microsoft, who have all recently announced caption features of their own for their respective platforms. Personally, I can’t wait to see how Instagram’s voice-to-text algorithm handles our local Manglish, so I hope to see the feature become available here soon. But what about you? Would you use the auto caption feature?
[ VIA ]
