TikTok Provides Disney Character Voices to its Text-to-Speech Function

This is a pretty cool announcement in and of itself, but in terms of timing, it’s also a brilliant example of corporate trolling and fighting back a competitor.

Today is Disney announced a new partnership with TikTok that allows TikTok users to choose from a range of Disney character voices for TikTok’s text-to-speech functionality.

Instead of that normal, slightly overly cheerful female voice that you hear over and over again in TikTok clips (I’m talking about you ‘Jessie’), you can use C-3PO or Rocket instead, which could be a good way to increase engagement, and will no doubt lead to new viral trends in terms of characters saying things they probably shouldn’t.

But that’s why it’s so great – just yesterday Instagram announced it would Adding Text-to-Speech to Reels, its TikTok replicant, along with its own speech effect tools.

Which of course lags far behind TikTok, as you can add this to your TikTok clips since then December last year, and as mentioned earlier, this is already a commonly used feature in the app. Given that, it makes sense for Instagram to add the same thing, but it also means TikTok is leading the way on another major innovation, and with Instagram constantly lagging behind, it will make it difficult to win back young users and become the cool place to go again to be one.

And now that Instagram is finally catching up on that element, TikTok is catching up with them right away.

That was unlikely to be planned as the feature was announced to coincide with it Disney + day, and could not be timed to match the start of the Instagram function. But it underlines once again that TikTok is the market leader in this space and that Instagram is the older, less cool app that is catching up on the cool new things months – almost a year – after the trend started.

And now TikTok has already advanced into the next phase, so Instagram’s speech-to-voice is second rate a day after it was released.

This is an incredibly happy time for TikTok and a perfect example of why it is right now the most popular appespecially with younger, more tech-savvy target groups.

If Instagram and parent company Meta are really looking to win back the youth, they’ll have to take the lead again in the space, and right now they don’t look anywhere near that. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company will mainly focus on younger audiences in the future, as part of a broader strategic shift to maximize long-term profitability. But in the early stages of this new venture, those efforts seem to focus only on messaging, trying to regain popularity through – somewhat ironically – partnerships with TikTok influencers.

That will help increase visibility, but it’s not that anyone doesn’t know what Facebook or what it is doing, so it won’t matter. The question is, will it help make Facebook and Meta cool again in general?

At the moment it feels a little forced, as if Meta is trying too hard to ride the latest trends and to be “with the kids downstairs” in its external communication.

The real winner for Meta on this front would be leading the next wave of innovation and creating new trends based on the latest features and user responses. Which is a tough way to go as you can’t control what catches on and what doesn’t in this regard, but Meta can invest in new tools and develop features that aren’t available in other apps.

That hasn’t been Meta’s forte in the last 5-10 years – and oh look, that’s the timeframe in which it lost touch with younger audiences.

Facebook was originally known for beating MySpace because it was better and cooler and people eventually migrated to the blue app and its functionality. Instagram then rose to be the next cool place, so Facebook bought this, then Snapchat gained ground as the trending app of choice. Facebook also tried to buy Snap, but since then it has essentially lost its place as the leader in creative innovation, with Snapchats Lenses becoming the leading trendsetter on key updates, and afterwards TikTok took over.

When was the last time Facebook or Instagram had a must-have feature that got everyone talking? As mentioned earlier, Snap Lenses have been doing this on a regular basis, while TikTok has also been able to spark new trends with features like Duets, creative AR tools, and yes, text-to-speech.

Getting people to talk about it and share these experiences is an important step, and Meta is in no way leading the way right now.

It’s interesting to see this so clearly in an announcement that, in turn, probably wasn’t planned that way. Which perhaps makes it even more meaningful in that regard.