Video Editing iPhone App “Clips” Turns Your Voice Into Captions

Apple has come up with its own video and photo editing app for the Social Media era. Instead of launching a social network app, a thing many companies are doing nowadays, it is offering Clips, a camera app that superimposes texts, filters, emojis and even voice-powered captions on your media #softwaremagic

Clips is not yet available on App Store but from what we’ve seen it’s easy to confuse it with Snapchat, Instagram or Prisma at first glance. That’s because the app opens with a square capture screen that immediately reminds you of a popular social media network. On the bottom of the screen, you have your usual Photo, Video and Library choice. That means you can either take a pic, record a video of up to 30 minutes in length or choose from your camera roll.

If you decide to go with in-app recording, you’ll see that several things can happen at once. You can activate Live Titles, which is a feature you probably haven’t encountered in any other social app. This lets you turn your voice into captions, in real time (or post-recording). The app can translate your message in text from 36 different languages. 

Another thing you can do while recording is applying filters, one of which is remarkably similar to the artistic styles offered by Prisma. You can also decide to go crazy with emojis, texts, location and time of day captions, plus add iTunes tracks.

Basically, “Clips” offers all the features you’ve come to love in different social media apps plus a couple of Apple novelties. Smart Suggestions is one of the latter. It makes use of the same facial recognition software used in Apple’s Photos app to identify people from your Contacts list in videos or photos. Then, it prompts you to share the Clip with them, via iMessage. 

The final video can have up to 60 minutes and include several trimmed videos, photos and Posters (full-screen graphics). Unlike other social apps, Clips stores all media locally on the smartphone leaving you to decide if you want to share it with the public or keep it for yourself and a select few.

It’s not clear when the iOS app will become available on App Store but it should happen before the next iPhone release, since it employs AR and Apple’s keen on launching their phones with this type of tech.