Instagram Reels gets its own alternative to TikTok’s robotic voice

Instagram Reels, the social media app’s short-form video platform similar to Snapchat Spotlight and YouTube Shorts, has finally added a text-to-speech feature

Instagram Reels, the social media app’s short-form video platform similar to Snapchat Spotlight and YouTube Shorts, has finally added a text-to-speech feature. With this new tool, users can add machine-generated spoken narration to their videos, something that is already very common on competitor TikTok’s platform.

TikTok videos are immediately recognizable due to the robotic voice often added to the content. Instagram has apparently taken inspiration from this trend and is now offering its own text-to-speech tool for its Reels platform. The feature will read text out loud when enabled on a video.

Though some people find the robotic nature of computer-generated voices annoying, the tool is useful for videos that are best with narration, but whose creators don’t want to use their own voice. The feature is now available within the Instagram app’s Reels section.

Users can add text-to-speech narration to a video by first adding text to a video in Reels, then tapping the text button. The triple-dot menu button now includes a “Text-to-Speech” option that, when tapped, presents two different voice options to choose from.

The feature is simple to use and, as a perhaps indirect bonus for Instagram, will make videos from its platform more readily identifiable based on nothing more than the voice presented in them. In addition to text-to-speech, Instagram has also added Voice Effects to Reels, a new feature that enables users to modify their video’s audio using options like “Announcer,” “Vocalist,” and “Giant.”