Instagram May Soon Generate Auto-Captions for Your Stories

Instagram has been spotted testing a new sticker for Stories that automatically generates captions. The new sticker, simply called ‘Captions’, can be added to any story with a video just like you would add a normal sticker on Instagram Stories. Once added, the sticker will transcribe the audio, and generate captions. Users can also easily switch fonts for captions while creating a story. Instagram’s Captions sticker is currently being tested with a small group of people. It’s still unclear when the new Captions sticker will roll out for everyone else.

Social media consultant Matt Navarra shared a video recording of Instagram’s new Captions sticker on Tuesday. The 30-second video reveals how the upcoming Instagram Stories sticker works. From the video, one can make out how the app is still incapable of accurately transcribing an entire video. However, this could change when the feature rolls out widely.

To use the Captions sticker on Instagram Stories, you’ll first need to add the Captions sticker to your video clip. Once you do that, the app will display a ‘Transcribing audio’ prompt on the display for a few seconds. After that, you’ll be able to view the text from the video clip as it plays. You can choose from four different font options for these captions.

Instagram’s Captions sticker should add to the accessibility factor, making it easier for those who have hearing problems to properly consume video clips on Instagram Stories. Besides accessibility, the Captions sticker will also enable a range of new content formats for creators on Instagram.

Apart from posting music with lyrics, this will be another way to synchronise text with video and audio within Instagram Stories. The tool would help creators reach new audiences, enabling more users to enjoy Stories while their audio is turned off.

In November last year, Instagram added a similar feature to its Threads app. The feature allowed users to automatically add captions to their videos. The app didn’t do well for the Facebook-owned company, but thousands of users created videos with auto-generated captions in Threads and posted the videos on TikTok. The app could also automatically censor (bleep) curse words while generating captions.

Instagram could soon add the same auto-generated captions functionality to Stories in the coming months, since it added automated captions for IGTV videos in September last year. The Facebook-owned company told Engadget that its Captions sticker isn’t widely available yet, while it’s being currently tested internally.