“What did they just say?” The Challenge of Dialogue

Picture this scene: you’re watching the season finale of your favorite show and the main character is about to drop a dose of plot-twisting information. Just then, a car alarm goes off, a dog starts barking, the doorbell rings and you miss the most important lines of dialogue.

“What did they just say?!”

It’s a common refrain in most households because dialogue intelligibility is a large and growing problem in home entertainment.

Defining dialogue intelligibility

What is dialogue intelligibility anyway? It’s basically the clarity and comprehensibility of spoken dialogue in television shows, movies and videos. In other words, it’s the ability to understand the speech – or dialogue as we say in the industry – without straining to hear. When dialogue intelligibility is good you can easily follow the storyline and grasp important details without missing anything because of poor sound quality, background noise, individual hearing ability or environmental issues.

Difficulties of understanding dialogue today

Dialogue intelligibility has become an increasingly frustrating issue in home entertainment for several reasons. For starters, today’s TVs feature sleek designs and thinner profiles that leave little room for high-quality loudspeakers. There’s also an overall emphasis on picture quality over acoustical performance in TV manufacturing. Post-processing audio solutions intended to address these issues often fall short and can even unintentionally affect dialogue clarity.

Content creation plays a role in dialogue intelligibility as well. Production budgets have shrunk while delivery requirements have gone up, meaning there’s both less time and money to optimize audio for home entertainment. Sometimes creative decisions prioritize artistic expression over dialogue clarity. Plus, most content is created in and optimized for ideal studio settings that don’t reflect the average person’s TV room or entertainment system.

Beyond manufacturers and creators, we also have to take into account the listener’s hearing abilities. A Fraunhofer survey showed that 68% of all study participants have problems understanding dialogue and 90% of people over age 60 have difficulty. Improving dialogue intelligibility, and creating individualized solutions for different stages of hearing impairment, becomes even more critical as the population ages.

Finally, we have to look at environmental conditions that affect dialogue intelligibility. External factors like street noise, HVAC systems, traffic, and landscaping can certainly make it harder to hear and understand dialogue clearly. But internal factors like small living spaces, close neighbors or sleeping children can also constrain volume levels to a point where it’s hard to hear what people are saying on TV.

The search for solutions

With multiple factors creating dialogue intelligibility problems it can be difficult to know exactly how to get started looking for solutions. So we begin by defining a clear problem statement, a rallying cry so to speak, that allows different teams to align on the problem and later collaborate on a solution.

For dialogue intelligibility, our problem statement is actually born from the question at the top of this piece: “What did they just say?” It’s a simple question we can all relate to because most people have experienced issues understanding dialogue at some point in their viewing history. And it’s a simple question that accurately describes the customer’s overall problem, dialogue intelligibility.

With the problem statement in hand the R&D teams now have wide latitude to approach potential solutions, while product management provides insight into the living room experience, content production challenges and customer empathy. The collaboration between the two helps ensure that solutions we develop are both technically sound and aligned with customer expectations and market demands. Our teams have been working diligently on finding solutions that do just that, and more.

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