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Hey Sonos Community!

We're thrilled to share some exciting news for Sonos Arc Ultra owners. We have just launched an update to the speech enhancement feature. Which now includes 4 levels (Low, Medium, High and Max).

 

What is improved with the new Speech Enhancement?

The new Speech Enhancement feature is designed to dynamically adjust your Arc Ultra's vocal output in real time. It uses AI to detect and clarify dialogue over background sounds, providing a clearer audio experience tailored to what you’re watching and your room’s environment.

What This Means for You

We developed this new Speech Enhancement for anyone seeking clearer dialogue. The feature offers four dynamic control levels, allowing you to fine-tune the sound to your specific needs and immerse yourself fully in your favorite shows, movies, and live events.

  • Low, Medium, and High levels provide a balanced enhancement.
  • Max level prioritizes dialogue clarity for those with hearing loss, controlling the dynamic range of non-speech elements to keep dialogue at the forefront.

How is This Different From the Old Speech Enhancement?

Traditional speech enhancement often boosted both dialogue and background noise, leading to an uneven and sometimes uncomfortable listening experience. The new Speech Enhancement uses advanced AI to isolate and clarify dialogue without excessively impacting volume or detracting from the overall cinematic experience. This results in more accurate, consistent, and better-sounding speech enhancement.

How to Access Speech Enhancement

It’s available now! If your Sonos app and Arc Ultra are up to date, you can activate it in the app or via Sonos Voice Control by saying, "Hey Sonos, Turn on Speech Enhancement."

Want to Learn More?

For an in-depth look at the technology behind AI Speech Enhancement check out our latest tech blog post:

Arc Ultra Speech Enhancement: Announcing A Step Change in Speech Enhancement Using AI

 

We hope you enjoy this new feature! Let us know what you think.

 

Just tried it. Seems very impressive but I’ve never had an issue with dialogue so will be interested in others views. 
Always good to see new features. 

Will you consider also adding the ability to adjust the center, left, and right channels the same as you can already do on the rear channels?  For me the Speech Enhancement raises the voices, but also makes the rest of the audio sound weird.  There is a digital choppiness that is hard to describe.  It is fine for something like HGTV, but a full atmos movie and it just kind of ruins the audio.  It would be super easy to fix, just allow us to adjust the center channel. 

I like having an extra level of speech enhancement and the AI seems to do a great job. What I don’t like AT ALL is losing the ability to preset the level of enhancement then just toggle “on or off” in the Now Playing screen. Please restore that feature!

There are 5 settings 😜
Off-Low-Medium-High-Max level.

Always had it on Off, after this update it seems like the dialogue has become lower than before 🤷
When it is on off is the dialogue lower than if you set it to low or ?

​@Peter_254 after I submitted the comment I realized that mine also was lower after the update.  So, I did redo the Trueplay last night, and that helped a lot.  I would still like to turn up the center channel though!  I understand there are 4 enhancements, but as I said I think the voices sound good, but the enhancement causes distortion on the left and right channels. So it depends on what you are watching.

If it is too hard to let the user adjust the center channel, I did think that it could be integrated with the Trueplay setup.  Ask the user what level they prefer as it starts, that way it is setup the way you like and avoids the need for a center level adjuster (which would still be nice).

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