What are live captions?
Live captions are a quick and easy way to provide subtitles for videos. They work by automatically adding captions (some would refer to these as “subtitles”) to videos as they are playing so that everyone can follow what is being said. This is a great option for those who want to share videos but don’t have the time or ability to create subtitles themselves. Also benefitting the audience, especially those with hearing impairments; live captions increase the accessibility of your content. Automated (or AI) live captions are available on several different social media platforms, including Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, as well as through multimedia agencies like ourselves.
The benefits of live captions
There are some benefits to using live captions. First and foremost, they make your content more accessible to a wider audience. This is important, as it opens up your videos, live streams, podcasts, and more to those who might not be able to access it otherwise. Additionally, live captions can help with SEO if applied correctly to website video content, as they provide additional text that can be crawled in search engine results. Research shows they also improve the user experience by making videos more engaging and easier to follow. Overall, using live captions is a great way to make your content more inclusive and engaging for all viewers.
How accurate are Instagram’s live captions?
The good news is that Instagram’s live captions are generally quite accurate. In tests by several different organisations, the platform’s AI-generated captions were found to be 95% accurate on average. This is a great accuracy rate, especially when compared to other platforms like Facebook and YouTube, which only achieve an accuracy rate of around 80% and 50%, respectively.
Like everything, the positives always come with some negatives. The app sometimes fails to accurately caption photos and videos, leaving followers with inaccurate information. Struggling to keep up with fast conversations, competing with background noise, and the speaker often moving their phone microphone around can lead to some very odd sentences being captioned. Incorrect live captions on Instagram can be frustrating, especially when the app is used to share important news or updates, or more specifically to you, your product/feature launches!
While the app generally gets most of the details right, it does make mistakes from time to time.
Drawbacks to using Instagram’s live captions for corporate social media
Instagram’s live captions are a great way to provide subtitles for your live videos. They’re free, easy to use, and can be turned on or off during the broadcast. But are they accurate enough to enhance your business’s social media content?
When live streaming for your business, you’re essentially ‘performing’ live and the last thing you want to think about is speaking slowly and over pronouncing every word – sadly, without adopting those approaches you might have some incorrect captions. Add in a guest collaborator on the video and you’ve potentially got even more to contend with; accents, speed, and diction to mention a few.
One of the biggest drawbacks to Instagram’s live captioning is that they only work with English language content at this time. The captions will be in English if you’re broadcasting in another language. if you are looking for multilingual captions the right multimedia partner could offer over 220 languages (wink wink).
If you find that Instagram’s live captions are inaccurate, there are a few things you can do:
- Report the issue to the app. This will help them to identify and fix the problem
- Contact the person or company who created the video to see if they can provide a better caption
- Finally, our personal favourite for obvious reasons, you can use a third-party service like VoiceBox to create accurate live captions for your videos
Since Instagram introduced live captions in 2019, it has become one of the most popular ways to enhance live videos with followers. The ability to add real-time captions to your videos can be a lifesaver for those who want to share live content but are hard of hearing or don’t know how to speak English. However, many people have wondered just how accurate these live captions are.
When using live captioning for your business’s content you want to get things right. After all, an incorrect caption could make a potential buyer change their mind. For peace of mind with live captions speak to the team at VoiceBox today.
Information correct at time of writing: 25/03/2022