Instagram has announced a significant expansion of its AI-powered reel translation feature, incorporating five additional Indian languages: Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. This update builds upon the feature introduced in October, which initially supported English, Hindi, Spanish, and Portuguese. The goal is to empower Indian creators to share Reels in more local languages and connect with a wider audience.
The AI-powered tool is designed to translate and dub Instagram and Facebook Reels, preserving the creator's voice and tone during translation. It also includes a lip-sync feature that aligns the translated audio with the mouth movements, creating a natural visual presentation. To ensure clarity, Instagram will label dubbed Reels with a "Translated with Meta AI" tag, and users can switch off translations or revert to the original audio through settings.
In addition to the language expansion, Instagram is introducing new Indian fonts for Instagram edits, supporting Devanagari and Bengali-Assamese scripts. This will allow creators to style text and captions in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and Assamese. Users can access these fonts in the editing timeline by selecting the "Text" option and filtering by language if needed.
Meta's AI dubbing tool translates audio and aligns the translated speech with the original lip movements. The system employs AI voice cloning to maintain the creator's voice consistently across languages. This technology preserves vocal characteristics such as pitch, tone, and speaking style.
These updates follow a series of recent features aimed at enhancing creativity on Instagram, including restyling photos and videos in Stories, bulk editing captions, reverse video playback, and lip-sync to animate photos. Creators now have access to over 400 additional sound effects.
The new AI translation features and Indian fonts will roll out on Android devices in the coming months. India is one of Instagram's largest markets, and this expansion ensures that regional creators can reach broader audiences locally and globally. By combining AI-powered dubbing with culturally relevant fonts, Meta aims to strengthen Instagram's role as a platform for diverse voices and creative expression.
Meta's strategy is to capture India's booming digital creator market. India represents Instagram's largest user base outside the US, with over 230 million monthly active users. These new tools aim to help creators reach wider audiences across regions, enabling them to share stories, entertainment, and educational content with viewers who may not understand English or Hindi. The feature also preserves creator identity through voice cloning and lip-syncing, offering a more natural viewing experience than subtitles alone.
