Instagram Tuesday began adding artificial-intelligence-powered automatic captions to videos on its IGTV long-form video destination.
The feature will start off in 16 languages worldwide.
People watching IGTV videos with the volume on zero will automatically see the captions, and they can go to their settings to control how and when they see them, or they can do so via an on/off toggle in the video drop-down menu.
Instagram said in an email, “Audio within Instagram videos is unique in that there are a variety of different languages, topics, acoustic conditions, cultural slang and accents. Auto-captioning videos requires cutting-edge research and engineering to power the AI that we use in the process.”
In November 2018, the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing network took steps to help the visually impaired, introducing automatic alternative text and custom alternative text for photos.