If you post videos to your Instagram feed, you should consider enabling auto-generated captions. Before March 2022, you had to manually transcribe captions for your Instagram videos, which was time-consuming and sometimes costly. That's no longer the case and you can enable captions as a creator and a viewer.Enabling automatic captions helps those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, or for those who prefer scrolling with audio off—it's a no-brainer.We're going to show you how to enable or disable auto-generated captions for Instagram feed videos that you create or watch.

What Is Instagram's Auto-Generated Captions Feature?

Your Instagram feed is a great place to share videos with your followers. But have you considered the accessibility of these videos? Those in the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities may struggle to understand what's said in them. Equally, sometimes people can't enable audio on a video, perhaps if they're in a public place.

As such, you should enable Instagram's auto-generated captions feature. While it won't transcribe accurately 100% of the time, the AI continues to learn. It saves you time from manually transcribing.

According to TechCrunch, at the time of writing auto-generated captions are available in the following languages, with more to come: English, Arabic, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Italian, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

This feature is different from the one available on Instagram Stories, which lets you overlay captions on your video via the sticker functionality. Here, we're going to focus purely on captions for the Instagram feed.

How to Manage Captions on Your Instagram Feed Videos

By default, auto-transcribed captions on videos you post to your Instagram feed is disabled. Here's how to enable it:

  1. Create a new Instagram post.
  2. Select a video from your gallery or film one.
  3. Apply filters and trim as necessary, then select Next.
  4. Tap Advanced settings.
  5. Beneath Accessibility, enable Show captions. This will also apply for all future videos. Return to this screen at a later date if you wish to disable it.

This is Instagram finally catching up with the pack. You've been able to add captions to TikTok videos for a long time.

If you post a video and want to remove the captions, you can. Here's how:

  1. Tap the more icon (three vertical dots).
  2. Tap Edit.
  3. Select Remove captions.
  4. You'll see a message asking if you're certain. Once you remove the captions, you can't add them again. To proceed, press Remove Captions.

How to Enable Captions on Instagram Feed Videos You Watch

If you're scrolling your Instagram feed and want to enable auto-generated captions for a video, it's easy:

  1. Tap the more icon (three vertical dots) next to the video.
  2. Select Manage captions.
  3. Enable Captions.

To disable captions, simply reverse the process.

This enables captions universally, if the uploader has chosen to use them, so you don't need to do this for every video. At first, you might find that not many people use this feature, but in time it should grow in popularity.

Stand Out and Aid Accessibility With Captions

Adding auto-generated captions to your Instagram videos is a wise move because it's great for accessibility and engagement. It means more people can watch and understand your videos, even if they can't hear the audio. Plus, Instagram lets the viewers know that the captions are AI generated, so any mistakes won't reflect poorly on you.