Amazon's New Tool Adjusts Sound So You Can Actually Understand Movie and TV Dialogue

[sl8]

https://www.indiewire.com/2023/04/amazon-dialogue-boost-feature-adjusts-movie-sound-1234829268/

Amazon’s New Tool Adjusts Sound So You Can Actually Understand Movie and TV Dialogue

"Dialogue Boost" uses AI to increase the volume of speech relative to background music and effects.

Brian Welk
4 hours ago

Raise your hand if you’ve found yourself recently rewinding your movie or episode back 10 seconds over and over again to pick up a line of dialogue you simply can’t make out, only to give in and finally turn on the dang closed captions. It’s a topic that’s been Googled and explained to death, and Amazon is finally doing something about it.

Introducing: Dialogue Boost, a new function from Amazon that lets you actually understand what’s being said on its shows. The AI-powered feature will let you increase the volume of dialogue relative to background music and effects, and you can customize it to your personal preference, all to create a “more comfortable and accessibly viewing experience.”

Amazon says Dialogue Boost was designed with the hard-of-hearing audience in mind to make their programming more accessible (open captions might be preferable). But this has been a complaint for many audiences in the digital era and should help address a more pervasive problem. For instance, say you’re watching “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.” You presumably now won’t be in a position where you’ve cranked the volume to hear what John Krasinski is saying, only for your eardrums to be blown out when there’s a sudden loud explosion. And we’re hoping this doesn’t become an issue like “Motion Smoothing” on your TV where filmmakers plead with you to watch their movie “the way it was intended to be seen.”

For now, the feature is only available on a handful of Amazon Originals, including “Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Harlem,” and movies “The Big Sick,” “Being the Ricardos,” and “Beautiful Boy.” Others will be added later this year.

[...]

[RandySF]

1. THANK YOU!!!

[Effete Snob]

2. What?

[RandySF]

3. It's difficult to hear the dialogue for a lot of streaming services.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

4. You'd think with it being AI driven you could just add a setting to the app itself

That will apply to everything you watch rather than being title-specific, but ... okay. It's a start.

I have a nice Denon HT Receiver with Audyssey and a 5.2.4 speaker setup, and I'm into nerdy home theater stuff ... so I don't really have this problem too often as I've got things pretty dialed to deal with this problem, but occasionally there are mixes in shows/movies that make it hard to hear voices clearly unless I go into Amp settings and tweak stuff.

Be nice if you could 'turn it on' for whatever you're watching.

[CentralMass]

5. I have a Bluetooth "dongle" that I plug into the audio jack if my tv

tjat I can conect to with some Bluetooth headphones that I have I use it when listening movies TV shows when I find it hard to pick up the speech.

[vanlassie]

6. You think they have the technology to spell words correctly

In Closed Captioning? How about a slight delay to allow translations to keep up? Sigh. The thing that REALLY gets me is when a prefilmed and edited program still has shitty captioning. Jeez.

[yonder]

8. What? And get rid of the muffs like Patsy Baloney (Pat Cippalone)?

Yeah I know, sometimes CC is all over the place and could do a lot better but the goofs can be hilarious too.

Here's another I just came across the other day:
Someone said "the power of grace" and was captioned as "the sour grapes".

[Hermit-The-Prog]

7. Easier: Hire an audio technician and fire directors during the making of vids

[progressoid]

9. I saw a couple of interesting videos about this recently.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

11. Thanks. I only saw one of those before. ...

You can always tell which actors have stage experience; you can understand what they're saying, in spite of stupid director tricks.

[hunter]

13. In the good old days of traditional television...

... and small town theaters the sound was severely constrained. Remember, most televisions didn't have stereo sound until the 'nineties.

So movie producers basically had two sound mixes -- one for the larger showcase theaters, and one for small town theaters and television.

With Blu-Ray and Digital broadcast television many producers just said "fuck it..." and skimped on, or skipped entirely, the simple stereo mix. A mix for a big theater will sound crappy and nearly unintelligible on any television without a big theater sound system.

I heard a lot of hemming and hawing about that in the second video. I found it interesting that Netflix considers this kind of slap-dash down-mixing of the theater sound track for streaming television unacceptable.

And, ah but of course, Amazon wants to do this down-mixing with AI, and it's going to be crap, just like 90% of the movies with these huge immersive sound tracks with their unrealistic explosions, engine noises, and other nonsense.

The art of making movies the old fashioned way, let's say on 35mm film with a simple analog stereo sound track, is fading... If you can't tell a story with that basic format (or its electronic equivalent) then it's probably a crappy story.

[RegulatedCapitalistD]

10. ME!!!

and it drives me nuts....and yes I do turn on Closed Captioning!

[dflprincess]

12. Reminds of a cartoon I saw a while ago, a wife speaking to her husband:

"No matter how loud you turn up the sound you will never understand that British detective."

And who among can say we have never been in the husband's position?

[LoveMyCali]

14. Ha

My boyfriend is very hard of hearing and I'm always telling him "don't worry I always have closed captioning on, I watch a lot of British TV."