One of the most common complaints about watching movies and shows on your TV at home is that the dialogue is garbled, weak, or can’t compete with the bombast coming from everything else on the screen.
The problem has gotten so bad that companies are coming out with products specifically to deal with it, such as soundbars that boost dialogue and TV audio settings that enhance audio frequencies where dialogue usually occurs. It is now common practice in many homes to turn on the subtitles and leave them on.
Last year, Apple added a feature called Enhance Dialogue to the Apple TV that works when paired with one Second generation HomePod. In iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and tvOS 18 coming this fall — and available in beta now — the feature works more broadly, with your device’s speakers or any connected Bluetooth buds and headphones.
Read more: How to Download iOS 18 Public Beta 3 on your iPhone
One downside to this Enhance Dialogue extension is that so far in beta versions, the feature only appears in the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Hopefully developers like Netflix, Disney, MAX, and other major broadcasters will be able to add support for it when system updates roll out in the fall.
Also, for Apple TV, the feature is limited to Apple TV 4K (second generation) and later models. Here is everything you need to know.
Apple 4K TV
How does Enhance Dialog work?
Many factors contribute to making dialogue incomprehensible.
When audio engineers mix sound for a movie, they’re often aiming for how it will play in a movie theater — and even there the variety of audio equipment and acoustics is all over the place. Mixing for the home can be even trickier, trying to accommodate setups that push sound from mediocre TV speakers as well as through elaborate home theater systems. Then you take all that data and squeeze it through compressed transmission channels, and now you’re a long way from the engineers’ goals.
Enhance Dialogue uses machine learning to distinguish between spoken words and other sounds and has two modes. Enhance it raises dialogue levels without affecting the other audio as much. Promotion it wets the background more aggressively and also enhances dialogue to make it stand out — the effect is most noticeable in scenes with a lot of competitive noise.
This easily overlooked feature will help you make out what’s being said on your device or TV so you don’t miss any nuance that would otherwise be drowned out by other noise.
How to improve dialogue on iPhone and iPad
Before we get started, you need to be running iOS 18, which is currently available to download as a developer beta and a public beta — we suggest you download the latter if you want a more stable version of iOS 18 .
Now, in iOS 18 or iPadOS 18, open the TV app and start playing a movie or TV show.
To enable “Enhance Dialog”, do the following:
- Tap the screen to reveal playback controls.
- touch Audio options button (which looks like a waveform inside a circle). If you’re viewing the video in portrait orientation, tap More button (…) and tap on Audio.
- Enlarge Improve the dialogue menu and select one Enhance OR Promotion.
Enable Enhanced Dialogue in the TV app under iOS 18. (Video is darkened when taking screenshots due to iPhone’s built-in copyright protection.)
How to improve dialogue on Apple TV 4K
The Apple TV interface for enabling Enhance Dialogue is almost identical to the iPhone and iPad interfaces.
- While a video is playing, tap the middle pad on the Apple TV remote to see onscreen controls.
- highlight Audio options button and press the middle button to see its options.
- Select Improve the dialogue and select Enhance OR Promotion.
The setting is saved for other videos you watch, not just the one currently playing. You can also set an “Enhance dialog” preference in the Apple TV settings. Go to Settings > Video and audio > Enhance dialog and choose one Enhance OR Promotion.
On Apple TV in tvOS 18, Enhance Dialogue is a system-wide setting, even if so far the feature appears to only apply to videos played in the TV app.