Instagram is trying to make it easy for content creators across all language communities to attain a vast consumer base utilising Meta AI. The social media platform has now significantly expanded its linguistic capabilities for users in India, announcing the integration of *Meta AI voice translations for Reels in five major Indian languages. The announcement, which was made at the ‘House of Instagram’ event in Mumbai, is said to boost content accessibility and help creators connect with a wider, international audience.
The new feature allows users to utilise Meta AI to instantly translate the audio in a Reel into five new Indian languages – Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. This is essentially an expansion of the existing voice translation service, which was previously available for global languages like English, Hindi, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Instagram brings new tools for creators
The AI translation tool is designed to preserve the original creator’s sound and tone of voice, ensuring the content retains its authenticity even after translation. This feature allows creators to essentially transform their reels to sound fluent in these widely spoken languages, helping them to effectively attract an international audience.
Adding to the immersive experience, Instagram is also introducing an optional lip-syncing feature that can be enabled to match the translated audio to the user’s mouth movements, creating the illusion that they are natively speaking the translated language.
To ensure clarity for viewers, Instagram will label the dubbed Reels with a “Translated with Meta AI” tag. Instagram says that users can switch translations off or return to the original audio through settings.
New Indian fonts for edits
In a further move to localise the app experience, Meta is also rolling out Indian fonts on Instagram Edits. This update allows users to style text and captions in regional scripts, with new fonts available for languages written in the Devanagari and Bengali-Assamese scripts, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Assamese. These custom fonts should help local creators to dive into more localised content without having to rely on third-party editing software.
