The Amazon Fire TV Stick setting you should try for better audio

Have you ever increased your TV's volume while watching a movie because the dialogue is too quiet, only to get blasted by a loud action sequence a few seconds later? Well, you're not alone. Plenty of people complain about modern movies and TV shows having unclear dialogue, making speech hard to understand. 

Part of this is down to the shooting process itself. According to Hollywood dialogue editor Austin Olivia Kendrick, modern microphones let actors perform more naturally, but this also means actors are more likely to mumble or speak softly, making speech harder to understand. Older recording equipment often demanded that actors stand in more deliberate positions and project their voices clearly, which is probably why dialogue in classic films often sounds so clear.

This isn't helped by many TVs also sporting a mediocre pair of stereo speakers, which often can't deliver the surround-sound experience modern movies and TV shows are designed for. Without a center channel, voices are usually mixed into the left and right speakers, which already handle background music and sound effects. To combat this, many manufacturers, including Amazon, offer a dialogue enhancement feature that makes voices clearer without requiring you to crank up the volume.

If you use a compatible Amazon Fire TV device, go to Settings > Display & Audio > Audio Settings and turn on Dialogue Boost. Available levels of dialogue boost include Low, Medium, High, Enhanced and Heightened. Different movie genres will likely benefit from different levels of voice enhancement. For instance, action-heavy films like John Wick may need more boost to overcome the constant gunfire and explosions, while slower, dialogue-heavy dramas like The Social Network might sound fine at a lower setting.

Amazon's Dialogue Boost feature debuted in 2022 on the Prime Video subscription service. It let users select a dialogue-boosted audio track during playback, but the feature was limited to select movies and TV shows and required pre-processing in the cloud. Amazon says the Fire TV Stick implementation uses AI models compressed to less than one percent of their original size, allowing them to run on-device and work in real time.

This means Dialogue Boost on Fire TV works with streaming services beyond Prime Video. According to Amazon, the feature relies on a neural network trained on thousands of hours of speech across different languages and accents, and an AI model analyzes the audio in real time and separates speech from background music and sound effects. This is how Dialogue Boost enhances voices without drastically altering the rest of the audio mix.

Even if you're not a Fire TV user, chances are you already have access to a similar feature on your TV or streaming device, especially if it's relatively modern. Samsung soundbars, for instance, offer a Voice Enhance mode, which basically does the same thing. The Night Mode option on your TV or soundbar can also help make dialogue easier to hear by reducing the volume of loud sound effects and boosting quieter parts of the audio.