Apple’s latest iOS app is designed to help iPhone and iPad users get social with videos—though it isn’t a social network itself. The company’s new Clips app lets you add filters, emoji, and animated text to short videos. Think of it like a mashup of Snapchat and iMovie.
The videos can be one clip or multiple clips. Apple says the new app will make it quick and easy to create multi-clip videos “without timelines, tracks or complicated editing tools.” Like other apps, you touch and hold a button to shoot live video or add photos, then you can add filters, speech bubbles, emoji and other items afterward. There are also stock music options, animated backgrounds, and text.
But the feature Apple is most proud of is called Live Titles. This is basically a speech-to-text transcription feature. It lets you add animated captions and titles using voice dictation. After dictation, you can tap added titles to change the text or punctuation, and add emoji. Live Titles will support 36 different languages at launch.
But Clips isn’t a social network in and of itself. Instead, it’s just a video capture and editing tool designed to let you share your creations on iMessage, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and other places online. There’s also a face recognition feature that suggests who you should share the video with based on who appears in the video.
The impact on you at home: Clips will be available on the App Store for free in April, though there’s no specific release date. The app only works with iOS 10.3 devices, including the iPhone 5s and up, the new 9.7-inch iPad, all iPad Air and iPad Pro models, the iPad mini 2 and up, and the sixth-generation iPod Touch.
Author: Ian Paul, Contributor
Ian is an independent writer based in Israel who has never met a tech subject he didn't like. He primarily covers Windows, PC and gaming hardware, video and music streaming services, social networks, and browsers. When he's not covering the news he's working on how-to tips for PC users, or tuning his eGPU setup.