Meta Expands Reels AI Translation To Hindi And Portuguese

Meta is expanding the use of its AI-powered translation for Reels, introducing Hindi and Portuguese throughout Instagram and Facebook. The move is meant to make it easier for people to understand videos without being blocked by language barriers, which will also give creators in two of the company’s biggest markets a direct route to audiences around the world.

The update is an extension of an initial rollout that began with English and Spanish, and it fits neatly into Meta’s larger effort to turn Reels into the default entertainment layer across its apps. It reduces the friction of cross-border discovery for creators in India and Brazil without necessarily having to film multiple-language versions.

Why Hindi and Portuguese Are Important for Reels

Both Hindi and Portuguese are mother tongues to millions of people. Languages such as Hindi and Portuguese have a high number of total speakers: Ethnologue estimates that they are — respectively — one of the top 3 spoken languages (Hindi), and one of the top 10 languages in terms of number of users all across Latin America, being widely spoken around Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa. That scale is crucial on a platform specifically designed for viral distribution.

Platform-wise, India and Brazil regularly rank near the top of Meta’s audience size list of countries. DataReportal’s most recent digital adoption snapshots keep both of those markets high on the list of places to reach people on Instagram and Facebook. Layer on top of that, thriving creator economies in Mumbai, Delhi, São Paulo, or Rio — and the language expansion becomes a clear growth lever for Reels consumption and ad inventory.

How AI Translation Works for Reels on Instagram and Facebook

For viewers, Reels translation can be turned on in order to translate videos into a preferred language so that clips shot in another tongue will automatically transform. That ranges from AI dubbing of the speaker’s voice to lip-sync corrections that synchronize mouth movements with translated audio, eliminating a cognitive dissonance familiar to viewers of legacy dubs.

For creators, the workflow is simple: Toggle the Translate Your Voice With Meta AI option before publishing, preview an auto-dubbed version for accuracy, and select target languages such as Hindi or Portuguese. Multi-speaker support — which is already live on Facebook Reels — is coming to Instagram, allowing for precise handling of conversations and group clips (as opposed to just a single voice track).

For on-screen text and caption stickers, Meta is also developing translation. When the feature is available, you can turn on Translate Text On Reels to see what the text says (this may come in handy for quiet watching situations or if you have difficulty hearing). The company said it plans to ensure the voicing of each creator is maintained in future updates, so all translated audio doesn’t sound like a generic narrator but rather the living, breathing person who created it.

Creator Gains and Advertiser Upside With AI Translation on Reels

Cross-language translation means literally addressing a longstanding growth ceiling: content that travels well visually often gets stuck in the spoken nuance of a particular language. With Hindi and Portuguese assistance, a comedy skit shot in Bengaluru is found and understood by somebody in Lisbon, or dance instructionals from São Paulo gain traction in Mumbai without the need for manual translation.

For brands, AI dubbing widens the addressable audience of creator partnerships without the logistical overhead of reshooting. It also unlocks new experimentation opportunities for performance marketers who can test creative across many languages rapidly in an industry where short-form content can be the lagging indicator. If Meta can ensure lip-sync quality and minimal latency across an entire platform at scale, it makes Reels a leaner channel for running multilingual campaigns.

Quality, Safety, and the Hard Problems With AI Dubbing

Auto-dubbing sounds great on pristine audio, but real-world Reels present some hard edge cases: ambient noise, slang, rapid code-switching, and regional accents. Hindi, particularly, tends to mix in English phrases, and Brazilian Portuguese has strong regionalisms. There’s voice work, there’s the verbal spoken wordplay, the meaning and timing of humor — especially in formats like lip-sync challenges — to be caught without crushing cultural cues.

Transparency is another pillar. Industry practice is to say when a voice has been AI-translated, and Meta has broader policies laid out for labeling synthetic media. Clear, consistent labeling assists creators in managing expectations and avoids confusion when a known voice comes across slightly different after translation.

The Competitive Context Among Meta, YouTube, and TikTok

YouTube has made a big investment in auto-dubbing, recently announcing improved lip-syncing and support for roughly 20 languages. TikTok extends subtitling and localization tools. Meta’s groundbreaker is two-pronged: integration with the Reels creation flow and efforts to keep the creator’s natural voice part of the system as technology advances.

If Meta keeps quality high and expands the number of languages it offers, it can start to remove this “language penalty” that still hobbles short-form discovery. That could skew the engagement toward creators who release once, translate many times, as opposed to keeping a separate channel or regional edits.

What To Watch Next as Meta Scales Reels AI Translation

Key signals to watch for are the availability of multilingual dubbing on Instagram, the introduction of text and sticker translation, and broader scope across other languages popular on Reels, like Indonesian and Arabic. Watch, too, for metrics Meta may surface around viewer completion rates and follow conversions on translated clips — useful proxies for whether AI dubbing lifts engagement beyond novelty.

For now, adding Hindi and Portuguese makes practical sense with outsized upside: It matches the places where Reels use is already strong and removes a major barrier to global distribution. If you can land the execution, creators get reach, viewers get understanding, and Meta gets yet more reasons for its audiences to stay inside the Reels flywheel.