Instagram on Tuesday announced AI-powered automatic video captions for IGTV videos, to make the platform more accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.
The rollout of Automatic Captions on IGTV is part of Facebook’s broader push to improve its platforms’ accessibility options. Automatic captions are available in 16 languages, but the announcement indicated the social media platform will be adding more.
Users will automatically see the captions if their volume is turned down. They can turn on captions via settings or from an in-video dropdown menu. According to the World Health Organization, this feature can help people with hearing loss, which impacts around 466 million people around the world.
“Audio within Instagram videos is unique in that there are a variety of different languages, topics, acoustic conditions, cultural slang and accents,” a Facebook company representative said. “Auto-captioning videos require cutting-edge research and engineering to power the artificial intelligence that we use in the process.”
Instagram VP of product, Vishal Shah, has announced that starting from September 16, Automatic captions will be rolling out to IGTV videos. The automatic captions can be enabled in Settings by turning on video captions.
