If you have the slightly bigger Arc soundbar and are in need of clearer speech, Sonos has a solution. Just not for the rest of its customers.
TV shows and movies have captions, and descriptive audio can be super helpful, but if you’re trying to listen to the sound in a programme and struggling, technology can assist.
For the past decade or so, one feature has made its way to soundbars and speaker systems aplenty: speech enhancement, a feature that picks up on the highs normally associated with vocals and attempts to boost the sound, isolating it in the process with more volume.
Similar to how night mode eases back on hefty lows and explosive sounds so you can watch movies without waking the little ones, speech enhancement technologies let listeners hear easily missed dialogue, and can be a big help to people with difficulty hearing.
But it can always be improved, and with AI, it just might.
Sonos has chimed in this week that it’s rolling out an improvement to its speech enhancement technology worked on with the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, building out a speech bolstering technology offering four levels of control to improve the audio.
The technology relies on machine learning to separate dialogue from other sounds in real time, allowing its AI system to control a range of audio and tweak the volume accordingly.
It’s a feature that comes at an ideal time, launching the same week as Global Accessibility Awareness Day is celebrated on the second Thursday of May, though there is a catch: this feature only works on the Sonos Arc Ultra.
That means if you own its predecessor, the Sonos Arc, or even one of its companies other soundbars, such as the Beam Gen 2 or the Sonos Ray, you won’t be able to run through the four levels of AI-infused speech enhancement. You can thank a lack of processing power for that, something only the Arc Ultra is apparently equipped for.
The same is true with the Sonos Ace, the first (and only) pair of headphones from Sonos, with these also not supported when wearing the Ace, either alone or connected to the Arc Ultra system. Sonos notes that “this is due to headphones being less affected by environmental noise and room acoustics that typically negatively affect dialogue clarity on loudspeakers”.
In short, headphones are less affected by the sound from your room, so the Ace doesn’t need this feature.
However, people with an Arc Ultra will see support for this feature very shortly, as the upgrade tools out this week.
They’ll need to upgrade their speaker system to hear it, of course, but that just means going without sound for a few minutes while everything is upgraded as some white LEDs blink.
