Facebook has rolled out automatic captioning in IGTV, Facebook Live and Workplace Live, powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

With the pandemic forcing more people to rely on video, both for communication and entertainment, captioning has become more important than ever. It’s critical for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, as well as those whose native language or dialect is different than the video they’re watching. In these instances, captioning is an invaluable resource to ensure effective communication.

To assist, Facebook’s engineers worked on AI-driven automated speech recognition (ASR), using it as the basis for the new feature. The feature is also designed to learn new words as the AI continues to be trained.

“It can easily learn a new word and predict where it will occur,” explains Julian Chan, a Facebook AI software engineer. “This was largely made possible using text data from public Facebook posts to train the system.”

The feature is currently available now and content creators can enable it at their discretion.