Feature available in 17 languages for the time being

Mar 1, 2022 23:03 GMT  ·  By

Instagram has just announced that content creators would be provided with auto-generated captions for their videos, with the feature to be available in 17 languages at first.

Needless to say, while the generated captions are enabled by default, users can manually disable them. But on the other hand, there’s a good chance many would stick with them, especially as in the past, generating captions for the uploaded videos was a pretty complicated process.

According to Instagram, there are only 17 languages that are supported right now, namely English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Italian, German, Turkish, Russian, Thai, Tagalog, Urdu, Malay, Hindi, Indonesian, and Japanese.

More languages to be added sooner rather than later

Most likely, the company is working on adding more languages in the coming months, but of course, no specifics on this front have been provided.

“We’re excited to announce auto-generated captions in IG Feed videos. Captions are default ON for creators — adding captions makes Instagram more accessible to those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. Viewers will have the option to turn captions on (or off). To start, captions are available in 17 languages (with more to come),” the company announced today.

Instagram is working on multiple fronts to improve the experience on the platform, especially as all its rivals are rolling out substantial improvements. For example, TikTok announced this week that it’s supporting 10-minute-long videos, therefore stepping on YouTube territory.

Instagram hopes that by rolling out auto-generated captions, more users would play the videos, especially when browsing the service on mute. This could indeed help, though it remains to be seen how accurate the captions are going to be, especially in languages other than English.

You can already try the new feature if you’re a content creator using one of the languages mentioned above.