You’re watching a movie or TV show, a character says something, and you don’t catch a word of it. Perhaps it just sounds like a mumbled mess or the background audio is too loud. You rewind, watch it again, and still can’t understand. In the end, you either give up or enable the subtitles. It’s a common problem that plagues modern media.
Thankfully, Apple TV has a brilliant aid for this with its automatic subtitles feature. It drastically improves my experience watching movies and shows on the streaming service.
What are automatic subtitles?
While you can always manually toggle subtitles on Apple TV, automatic subtitles are designed to appear temporarily when they are most likely to benefit. This comprises two settings: “Show When Muted” and “Show on Skip Back”.
Show When Muted automatically turns on subtitles when your volume is muted or turned very low. This can be helpful in various scenarios, like if you need to briefly hear something in the room while still watching the TV.
Show on Skip Back temporarily turns on subtitles when you rewind up to 30 seconds. This is the setting that I think is the most useful; I’ve benefited from it countless times. Rather than fumbling with the remote to rewind, turn on the subtitles, and then turn them off again, this feature handles everything in a single action. You rewind, it displays subtitles for what you’re rewatching, and then it disables the subtitles.
Of course, it’d be much better if the dialogue was clear in the first place, but it’s a long-standing issue that doesn’t seem to be improving. Muddy dialogue can happen for many reasons, such as the movie or show having a bad audio mix (or one designed for professional sound systems rather than a TV), poor quality TV speakers, or the actor literally mumbling their words. There are steps you can take to hear audio more clearly, but there isn’t a single solution.
How to enable automatic subtitles
You can enable automatic subtitles on any device you use to watch Apple TV. In my tests, adjusting it on one device doesn’t automatically reflect elsewhere. As such, you likely need to follow these instructions for every device where you wish to enable automatic subtitles.
On your web browser:
- Go to the Apple TV website.
- In the top-right, click your profile icon and select “Settings”.
- Scroll down to the “Web Settings” section.
- Within “Automatic Subtitles”, enable “Show when muted” and “Show on skip back”.
On your mobile or tablet:
- Open the Apple TV app.
- In the top-right, tap your profile icon.
- Scroll down to the “Automatic Subtitles” section.
- Enable “Show when muted” and “Show on skip back”.
On your TV:
- Open the Apple TV app.
- From the homepage, press left to open the menu.
- Select “Settings”.
- Within the “General” section, select “Automatic Subtitles”.
- Enable “Show on skip back” and “Show when muted”. The latter may not be present; it’s unsupported when your TV volume is controlled by an infrared remote.
Try using Apple TV’s audio enhancements too
Apple recognizes that dialogue can sometimes be difficult to hear; it’s a key reason why the skip back subtitles setting exists. Apple TV also goes one step further with a function called “Enhance Dialogue”, which makes the dialogue more prominent.
Unfortunately, Enhance Dialogue isn’t available on every device. You should see it on the Apple TV smart TV app or when using a physical Apple TV media player (which runs on tvOS), for example, but you won’t see it on the web.
You can toggle the function while watching something on Apple TV. On the playback controls, select the icon that looks like a sound wave with a circle around it. The exact options you see will depend on your device. You may only see “Enhance” or “Enhance Dialogue”, which gives the standard enhancement with minimal impact to the audio mix. You may also see “Enhance More”, which makes the dialogue even more prominent, though at the cost of heavier alteration to the audio mix.
Credit: Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek
Play around with these options and see what suits you. It will depend on personal taste and your specific audio setup. In fact, you may find you prefer not using Enhance Dialogue entirely.
I think every service should have automatic subtitles. Ever since I started using it on Apple TV, I’ve craved it on other streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video. Especially considering more and more people are using subtitles when watching movies and shows, it seems like a no-brainer—it’s one of the reasons why Apple TV is so good.
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Apple TV is the only place you can see Apple Original movies and shows, such as Severance, Ted Lasso, and Silo.
