Amazon has introduced a new Prime Video feature called Dialogue Boost. It is designed to isolate dialogue and make it louder than other audio streaming on the service.
Amazon describes how it works on their blog:
Dialogue Boost analyzes the original sound in a movie or TV series and intelligently identifies places where dialogue might be hard to hear due to background music and effects. The speech patterns are then isolated and the sound is amplified to make the dialogue clearer. This AI-based approach delivers targeted enhancements to portions of conversational dialogue rather than overall center channel boost in a home theater system.
However, not all content will be eligible for the dialogue enhancement feature – at least not yet. Amazon says it “originally launched on select Amazon Originals around the world”such as The Amazing Mrs. Maisel and Big Sick.
While this is partly a feature of hearing-impaired accessibility, Amazon is also responding to a widespread complaint among viewers.
A 2022 survey found that 50 percent of 1,260 American viewers “watch subtitled content most of the time,”with many referring to “fuzzy sound”and saying that it’s harder to understand dialogue in movies and TV shows than it used to be .
Problem with dialogue
There is no one simple reason for this development. It combines several factors, but many of them can rightly be categorized as a “fragmented viewing experience”.
Decades ago, most televisions or home theater speakers had similar audio capabilities. However, the range of devices used, from built-in speakers in cheap TVs and laptops to high-quality Dolby Atmos surround sound systems with AI-optimized sound fields and everything in between, has grown. In addition, TV manufacturers present a wide range of proprietary technologies and configurations that they can try to use to differentiate their products in marketing materials by changing the way the same content sounds on virtually every device.
All of this means that professionals who process and encode audio for distribution on streaming networks are short on work. Some shows prioritize sounding good for the most expensive configurations, but the comparative lack of dynamic range in cheaper speakers can leave owners of smaller systems sounding confused. But even if (futile) efforts are made to encode audio for the widest possible audience, devices will still be so fragmented that it may not be possible to provide a quality experience for everyone.
It’s the same set of core issues as the TV show that some viewers find too dark. Many of us remember the episode of the last season of Game of Thrones when the audience squinted in vain to see what was going on. It used cinematic techniques played on small screens with limited contrast, peak brightness, and dynamic range, although the then-low resolution and bitrates of HBO Go and HBO Now were a particularly significant problem in this particular case.
Anyway, back to audio: some streaming boxes or audio systems, like the Apple TV 4K or Sonos home theater systems, offer built-in dialog amplification, but not everyone uses these devices. In theory, Amazon’s new feature should work on just about anything, even if it doesn’t yet support dialog amplification.
The company has not announced when this feature will be expanded to more content. But we wouldn’t be surprised to see a rapid expansion – not just from Amazon, but from other streamers offering similar features.