Eh? What's that? You're struggling to make out the dialogue on your favourite streaming shows? You're not the only one. Now Amazon has launched a new feature that hopes to make dialogue clearer than ever.
It's called Dialogue Boost, and it lets you adjust the volume of the dialogue relative to other audio such as background music and effects. It's an accessibility feature designed for the hard of hearing. But if you've had to resort to subtitles while watching Daisy Jones & The Six – as we have recently – you should hear the benefit.
So how does it work? It uses AI to analyse the audio and "intelligently identifies points where dialogue may be hard to hear above background music and effects," Amazon says in a blog post. It then isolates the speech patterns and enhances the audio to make dialogue clearer.
Because it's done server side and doesn't rely on boosting the centre channel, it works on any device that runs Prime Video, and not just home cinema systems. This includes mobiles, smart TVs, and devices such as the Apple TV and Google Chromecast. And you can adjust the boost level, choosing between medium and high.
It's only available on select Prime Video originals at the moment, including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Harlem, as well as movies including The Big Sick, Beautiful Boy and Being the Ricardos. But Amazon promises it will come to more titles later this year.
To see if a title supports Dialogue Boost, look at its detail page.
Prime Video was redesigned last summer, and now looks a lot slicker than it did. It also makes it much clearer which content is included in your Prime subscription, and which costs extra, addressing one of the streaming service's main criticisms.
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