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
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
Related Stories
- Warwick Davis calls out Disney for deleting Willow from Disney+
Actor Warwick Davis has shared a behind-the-scenes photo from Willow, which was deleted from Disney+ last year. And he’s not very happy about it either.
Disney+ started deleting its own content in 2023. A lot of great films and TV shows were axed and aren’t available anywhere else, which feels thoroughly unfair for the people involved [...]
- The top 45 must-see films of 2025
Looking ahead to 2025, here are the 45 films of all genres - from horror to comedy to drama and more - we reckon you really shouldn't miss.
Special mentions:
Firstly, the movies you won’t be seeing, but want to namecheck. Our rules were that we didn’t want to include films that had screened, but not made [...]
- The three movies Disney made instead of Wicked
Wicked’s road to the screen has been a long one, but has Disney been reacting to it since the musical first hit Broadway?
NB: This feature contains spoilers for Wicked Part One, Oz The Great And Powerful, and Maleficent.
Long before Wicked became a Broadway smash-hit in 2003, Disney had a history of near misses with the [...]
- The Creator, Barbarian, The Banshees Of Inisherin and Amsterdam are all gone from Disney+
Four major recent releases from Disney have disappeared from the Disney+ streaming service in the UK - one of which is now exclusive elsewhere.
I’m going to have a go at trying to work out how the ins and outs of Hollywood studios go, but still confess it baffles me a bit. Back when Disney acquired [...]
- The Abyss | The BBFC defends (again) its decision not to classify the film
Disney tried to re-release The Abyss in UK cinemas it's effectively been confirmed, but pulled the plan due to a lack of BBFC certificate.
The long wait for James Cameron’s The Abyss to get a 4K remaster and fresh physical media release finally ended around a year ago – but not if you’re in the UK. [...]
