Apple has unveiled a new iOS app called Clips, presenting the company’s long-awaited take on hugely popular services such as Snapchat and Instagram Stories.
Though Clips is a simplified video-editing app rather than an ephemeral image-sharing social network such as Snapchat or Stories, its design shares great similarities with those apps. Allowing users to stitch together videos and photos in order to create a “story” for viewers to watch, along with providing an array of filters/emoji overlays and the ability to insert a soundtrack either from a selection of pre-recorded tunes (including one recorded by infamous composer Hans Zimmer), or from the user’s iTunes library. Whatever music you drop into your Clip, the app will automatically trim it to the length of the video.
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Apple will also utilize its increasingly impressive speech-to-text technology for Clips’ Live Titles feature, which will see the app able to display captions in real-time by recognizing the user’s voice. As Apple describes it: “Live Titles let you easily create animated captions — just by talking as you record. Choose from a variety of styles, all perfectly timed to the sound of your voice.” We can imagine this will have some potentially hilarious consequences when put into practice.
Discussing the new app, Apple’s vice president of Apps Product Marketing Susan Prescott said:“Clips gives iPhone and iPad users a new way to express themselves through video, and it’s incredibly easy to use. The effects, filters and amazing new Live Titles we’ve designed for Clips let anyone make great-looking, easily sharable videos with just a few taps.”
Clips will not launch alongside its own dedicated social network, but will instead allow users to create their videos before uploading them to existing platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. While this may seem like a curious choice for the company, providing a halfway point between the primitive video tools featured on iOS and the more robust iMovie will certainly be appealing to iPhone and iPad users, allowing them to creature fun visual stories on the fly. The app will allow users to take videos/photos from their camera roll or to record instantly, similarly to Instagram.
Clips will be released on the App Store next month, though a limited preview has been released. You can learn more right here.
