Meta is bringing its AI voice translation tool to Instagram Reels, meaning you could soon see people in your feed appearing to speak a different language to what they recorded the video with.
Announced by Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Wednesday, the Llama 4-powered Meta AI feature that provides live, lip-synched translations, will be added to all public Instagram accounts, as well as Facebook. It's not clear exactly when this will go live, but when it does, the only language available will be Spanish to English and vice versa, with more languages to come.
"We believe there are lots of amazing creatives out there who have potential audiences who don't necessarily speak the same language," Mosseri said in a Threads video. "If we can help you reach those audiences who speak other languages, reach across cultural and linguistic barriers, we can help you grow your following and get more value out of Instagram in the platform."
In the video, Mosseri includes the AI-translated version of his video announcement, and the results are undeniably wild. The Instagram head's voice and mouth appear in synch with the Spanish translation, and honestly, if this video landed in my feed, I'd probably assume Mosseri had recorded it in Spanish.
Meta announced its AI live translation tool in September 2024, powered by the company's Large Language Model (LLM) Llama. In a blog post last year, Meta said it had been testing "translating some creators' videos from Latin America and the U.S. in English and Spanish."
Live AI language translation isn't unique to Meta, with competitors Google Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and myriad multilingual translation companies providing such tools. Google Pixel 10's new Voice Translate feature, announced yesterday, live-translates phone calls with matched voices. Apple's iOS 26 real-time translation tools will be ones to contend with.
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TikTok's translation tools, for a social media comparison, are largely text based for captions, with some users using third-party apps to translate TikTok Lives.
However, seeing live AI translation in an Instagram Reel feels a little jarring to many users. In the comments of Mosseri's video, people have raised concerns over Meta's AI tool, including the pitfalls of potential mistranslation and suggesting that AI subtitles could be a better move.
"As a person who Spanish is her mother tongue, I must say this sounds and looks creepy. AI subtitles are more than enough," wrote @singlutenismo.
"AI subtitles would be great, but automatically altering and reprocessing human voices is as questionable as altering and reprocessing their skin color," wrote @cuernomalo.
"It’s kind of disconcerting because how do I know the translation is accurate or the way I phrase things is appropriate for that culture and language," wrote @drinksbywild. "I do a lot of recipe content so I don’t want somebody to make my recipe incorrectly because of a bad translation."
Mashable has reached out to Meta for further information, and we'll update this story if we hear back.
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