Introducing DTS Clear Dialogue

As televisions picture quality and resolution have gotten infinitely better, hearing and understanding dialogue has gotten worse. We previously discussed many of the factors involved in diminishing the quality of dialogue intelligibility. Today, however, we’re excited to discuss a brand new solution that addresses the issue of dialogue intelligibility directly. It’s called DTS Clear Dialogue and it will change the way people experience dialogue while watching TV.

What DTS Clear Dialogue does

Everyone can relate to the all too common experience of struggling to understand what people are saying on TV. Subtitles can help, but reading words on the screen takes away from the enjoyment of watching TV unencumbered. DTS Clear Dialogue improves the understandability of spoken language by allowing viewers to adjust the volume of the dialogue itself. Quite simply, DTS Clear Dialogue puts an end to the question “what did they just say?”.                             

How DTS Clear Dialogue works

DTS Clear Dialogue uses a number of different techniques to improve dialogue intelligibility. For starters, it separates dialogue from background audio. This is accomplished by leveraging proprietary AI-based audio processing to first identify, then separate and finally enhance spoken dialogue from any given audio track.

Next, because dialogue intelligibility affects viewers in different ways, DTS Clear Dialogue gives people the ability to personalize the experience by allowing them to adjust the dialogue volume to meet their individual listening needs. Many current solutions are a one-size-fits all approach with a subpar and complicated user experience. DTS Clear Dialogue bucks that trend by offering various levels of personalization, dependent on the implementation selected by the TV manufacturer.

Not everyone speaks the same language or watches the same kinds of shows of course. So DTS Clear Dialogue has been developed to work across various languages and content sources. This language-inclusive and content-agnostic approach means DTS Clear Dialogue will improve dialogue intelligibility for anyone watching movies, TV shows, sports and live events, through either streaming services or broadcast.

Finally, DTS Clear Dialogue offers an incredibly flexible integration for TV manufacturers. This lets them decide how to best incorporate the solution into their devices.

Who DTS Clear Dialogue is for

As alluded to above, this solution is really for everyone. The issue of dialogue intelligibility affects people who watch TV around the world. To reach them, we’re working directly with the TV manufacturers themselves first. The TV OEM will ultimately own the user experience and can control how they want to present this feature to their customers.

For example, one possible solution for manufacturers is to create a dedicated button on the TV remote just for dialogue. Another could be to use voice commands such as “increase dialogue volume” or adding dialogue volume control to the existing TV volume overlay for easy and intuitive access to the feature.

Example volume control for demonstration purposes

The AI, and DTS, difference

At DTS, we’ve spent decades developing and implementing the exact kind of expertise and knowledge around audio, audio-processing and advancements in AI and machine learning techniques to create something like DTS Clear Dialogue. It’s a revolutionary solution, years in the making, to a long-running problem.

DTS Clear Dialogue is trained on an extensive dataset of all kinds of audio scenes and examples, which allows it to identify and separate spoken dialogue from other audio elements for any incoming audio stream, and then apply our intelligibility processing to it. The results are immediately obvious, especially when combined with today’s TVs that are more powerful than ever and capable of running complex operations like a neural network which is part of the technical foundation of this product.

And while our initial focus has been on TVs, we’re already looking at offering this solution to other device categories in the near future. Right now we’re excited that our SDK is readily available today and are working with relevant chip partners to make DTS Clear Dialogue available to all the television manufacturers, and their customers, out there and waiting.

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