This was something we were very excited to find!
Instagram is currently trialing out a captions sticker in Stories – we talked about why it was a good idea to include captions on your stories back in 2019 but here’s the basic version: it makes your talking stories more accessible to those who are unable to hear the audio clearly, whether that’s for medical reasons or just can’t turn the volume on. If you used the Threads app with the captioning feature, then this works in pretty much the same way.
It’s easy to use as well, on both content that you record direct in the app or if you load in an pre-recorded video. You just record or load the video, then go into the stickers section and search for captions. If it’s available to you, then you’ll see the above sticker icon then you just tap it and it will transcribe the content for you.
If the transcription doesn’t get it quite right, then you just tap the text, and it will be broken down by word, so you can edit it easily. If you say a swear word that the transcription recognises, it will put a chain of symbols ($@#%) in place. If you want to replace a word with that chain, you just tap the relevant word, then tap “+bl*ep” which is just above the keyboard.
There are four different ways to display the text – one where you get the different size text which shows up word by word, one where it types out in a typewriter font letter by letter (which isn’t as accessible as the others – something to consider), one where there are a few lines of text at a time (probably the most accessible and useful for people) and one that scrolls line by line. If you’ve used the music sticker on Stories with the lyrics option, you’ll recognise how they are displayed.
It’s not available on all accounts yet, but hopefully this will be rolled out to everyone soon!
