On 3 September 2026, TikTok announced four new ways to comment under a video: voice comments of up to 60 seconds, polls with up to five options, photo carousels of up to nine images, and Live Photos that play a short burst of motion before settling into a still. The announcement came through the TikTok Newsroom under the title “Say More in the Comments”, and TechCrunch, ABC News and Gizmodo reported the details the same day.
Until now a TikTok comment was text, a single photo or a video sticker. From this month it can also be a minute of somebody’s voice. For anyone who runs a brand account, that changes the shape of the job: the comment section becomes harder to skim, harder to filter by keyword, and, for the first time, something a creator can use to ask the audience a structured question.
What TikTok announced
TikTok’s post frames the change around scale. By the platform’s own count, more than 1.7 billion comments are shared on TikTok every day, and the section under a video has become, in TikTok’s words, a place where people react, joke and build on each other. The four additions are:
- Voice comments. Tap the microphone icon in the comment box and record up to 60 seconds of audio. Voice comments are limited to users aged 18 and over and roll out globally over the coming month. TechCrunch reports that they fall under TikTok’s Community Guidelines and are moderated by a mix of human review and automated detection, including speech-to-text transcription.
- Comment polls. A creator can post a poll as a comment on their own video, with up to five options and a voting window the creator sets. Results update in real time in the comment section. Polls are available globally now. TikTok’s own examples are choosing an outfit, picking a dish to cook, or voting on the next video idea.
- Photo carousel comments. Up to nine photos in a single comment, where previously only one was allowed. Rolling out globally over the next month.
- Live Photo comments. Upload a Live Photo from the camera roll and it plays a brief motion clip before showing the full image. Available globally now.
ABC News quotes TikTok’s reasoning for the audio format: “Sound and music have shaped TikTok from the very beginning, turning songs into trends and audio clips into jokes shared across the app.” TechCrunch describes the additions as features borrowed from messaging apps to deepen engagement on the platform.
Context: the comment section as a product
Comments on TikTok have been growing into a second surface for some time: photo comments, then video sticker comments, and creators routinely reply to a single comment with a full video. Gizmodo’s Ece Yildirim describes the section as having become “miniature forums, complete with self-referential jokes and a language all their own”, and reads the new formats as TikTok building a site within its site.
The poll is the piece that most directly serves creators and brands: it puts a structured question where the conversation already happens, on a video that stays in the feed. Only the account that posted the video can start a poll on it, so the format is a creator tool rather than something viewers can add.
Voice is the piece with the widest consequences. Gizmodo points out the risk: TikTok’s moderation increasingly relies on automated tools, and audio is harder to police than text. TikTok’s answer, via TechCrunch, is transcription plus the same detection as everything else. Whether that holds at scale, nobody outside TikTok can measure yet.
Details that matter for account managers
Rollout is staggered. Polls and Live Photos are live globally as of 3 September. Voice comments and photo carousels arrive over the following month, so an account may see them appear on some videos before others. Do not build a campaign around voice replies until you can see the microphone icon on your own posts.
Voice is 18+ only. Accounts run by or aimed at younger audiences will not see voice comments from under-18 users. For brands in categories with age gates, this is worth noting in the moderation brief.
Paid content has its own tooling. TikTok’s Comments Manager in Ads Manager lets advertisers view, reply to, like, block, export, hide and filter comments on ads, individually or in bulk, and maintain a Blocked Word list that hides comments containing set words or phrases. TikTok’s documentation describes this tool for comments on ads; organic videos are managed from the app. Neither TikTok’s announcement nor its help pages yet say how a Blocked Word list treats a voice comment, so we treat text filters as covering text only until the platform says otherwise.
What it means for your business
Rewrite the moderation brief before the features reach your account. Most brand moderation on TikTok is built around keywords and visual spot-checks. Neither works cleanly on a 60-second audio clip or a nine-photo carousel. State in the brief that voice comments are listened to, not skimmed, set a rule for voice comments in a language the moderator does not speak, and budget more time per comment rather than more comments per hour.
Use polls where you already ask questions in captions. If your posts end with “which one would you pick?”, a comment poll gives you a countable answer instead of a thread to tally by hand. Because only the poster can start a poll, it also stays under your control: you choose the options, you set the window, and the result sits on the video for anyone arriving later. Start with low-stakes choices and use the answer in the follow-up video so the audience sees the vote mattered.
Decide now whether the brand replies in voice. A voice reply from a brand account is a tone-of-voice decision, not a feature decision. It can sound warm from a founder-led account and odd from a bank. Whatever you choose, write it down: who is allowed to record, in which languages, and what never goes into audio, such as prices, terms or anything a lawyer would want to see in writing.
Treat carousels as user-generated content with the usual rights caution. Nine photos of your product in one comment is a gift for a social media team looking for real customer material, and the same rights question applies as always: a comment is not a licence to reuse the image in your own posts or ads. Ask, and keep the answer.
Watch the reply rate, not the comment count. A comment section with polls and voice notes will look busier. The number that tells you whether the format helps is how many of those comments you can respond to within your service window, and whether the poll results change what you post next. If moderation time goes up and response rate goes down, the new formats are costing you, not helping.
We expect voice comments to be the format brands adopt last and creators adopt first, and polls to become standard on product accounts within the year. The sensible move this month is small: update the moderation brief, run one poll, and see what the audience does with it.
