A long-requested feature has finally made it to Amazon’s Prime streaming service, hopefully causing other services to follow suit.
Well, hooray. Amazon Prime Video has added a new feature to its streaming platform that we hope will herald the beginning of a new industry standard. The company has announced that a new ‘dialogue boost’ accessibility feature is now usable on selected titles, using ‘an AI-based approach allowing viewers to adjust the volume of spoken dialogue without changing the volume of the background music or sound effects.’
At the moment, the feature is only available on a handful of titles, but a quick (and extremely unscientific) test on this writer’s phone confirms that The Big Sick is one such film which now allows you to noticeably boost the dialogue. For anybody who gets frustrated with unintelligible dialogue but doesn’t want to watch with subtitles on all of the time, this feature will be very welcome indeed, hopefully putting an end to pausing, rewinding, turning on subtitles, replaying and turning off subtitles. An immersion-breaking routine that is all too-common in this writer’s residence.
Hopefully too, this feature will become standardised across all platforms fairly quickly, especially Disney+ where the amount of clicks it takes to enable and disable subtitles, just to catch one line of dialogue, can almost give you repetitive strain injury. Thanks to Dark Horizons for noticing this and you can check out the selected titles right now, which span shows including Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Harlem whilst a few films like The Big Sick, Beautiful Boy and Being the Ricardos also have it. With any luck, it will become a universal accessibility feature across all titles very soon.
Image: BigStock
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