Beyond your typical image and video sharing in the form of posts, the platform lets users post a variety of content in the form of Stories, Reels and longer format IGTV videos that can be up to one hour in length.
Instagram has captivated its users for many years now. Statista.com has reported that in 2018, the social media platform had approximately one billion active users. This number has grown significantly since then. As per eMarketer’s forecasts, Instagram users will cross 1.18 billion by 2023.
As Instagram's feature offerings have evolved over time with the advent of Stories, Reels and IGTV posts, so has the need for its user profiles to be more inclusive. Interest in binge-watching content grew significantly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with 70% of marketers looking to up their investment in video. (Source: Social Media Examiner).
The World Health Organization estimates that there are currently 466
million people with hearing loss or 6.1% of the world's population. This number is expected to grow to 630 million by 2030 and may be over 900 million in 2050, unless action is taken.
Perhaps in a response to this data and in an effort to make the platform more accessible to all users, Instagram has released a new accessibility feature that will automatically add AI-powered closed captions to IGTV videos in 16 languages and counting.
"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 requires cutting-edge research and engineering to power the artificial intelligence that we use in the process."
In order to enable closed captions on your IGTV videos, follow these easy steps:
1. Click on your profile icon on the bottom right
2. From there, tap the three horizontal line icon at the top right
3. Click "Account"
4. Click “Captions” and toggle on “auto-generated captions”
5. Now, load your IGTV video
6. Before publishing, select "Advanced Settings"
7. Enable "Auto-Generated Captions"
8. Click "Done" and congrats, your video is now accessible and inclusive!
Since Instagram's closed captions are auto generated, there will be some inevitable inaccuracies that depend on a number of factors including background noise, speech clarity, etc.
Using SyncWords' professional tools and services can make your captions and subtitles 100% accurate. We offer human generated transcripts, tools to edit and clean up your transcripts, the ability to translate to over 100 languages and a burn-in option to have your captions overlaid on your video. That way, all you'll need to do is upload your IGTV video to Instagram and it'll already be captioned with the highest accuracy possible.
