This Apple TV feature revolutionized how I watch movies and shows

You're watching a movie or TV show and a character says something and you don't catch a word. It might just sound like clutter or the background sound is too loud. You rewind, watch again and still don’t understand. Eventually, you either give up or turn on the subtitles. This is a common problem that plagues modern media.

Luckily, Apple TV has a great help with this: its automatic subtitles feature. This greatly improves my experience watching movies and shows on a streaming service.

What are automatic subtitles?

While you can always manually toggle subtitles on Apple TV, automatic subtitles are intended to be displayed temporarily when they're most likely to be useful. It includes two settings: “Show when muted” and “Show when skipping backwards.”

The Show When Muted feature automatically turns on subtitles when the sound is muted or set to very low levels. This can be useful in a variety of situations, such as if you need to briefly hear something in the room while still watching TV.

The Show on Rewind feature temporarily turns on subtitles when you rewind 30 seconds. I find this setting to be the most useful; I have benefited from it countless times. Instead of fiddling with the remote to rewind, turn on subtitles, and then turn them off again, this feature handles everything in one step. You rewind, it displays subtitles for what you're rewinding, and then turns off the subtitles.

Of course, it would be much better if the dialogue was clear to begin with, but this is a long-standing problem that doesn't seem to be improving. Muddy dialogue can happen for many reasons, such as a bad audio mix in a movie or show (or because it's designed for professional sound systems and not a TV), poor quality TV speakers, or an actor literally muttering his words. Eat steps you can take to hear audio more clearlybut there is no single solution.

How to enable automatic subtitles

You can turn on automatic captions on any device you use to watch Apple TV. In my tests, a setting on one device is not automatically reflected on another. So you'll likely have to follow these instructions for each device you want to enable automatic subtitles on.

In your web browser:

Go to Apple TV website.
In the top right corner, click your profile icon and select Settings.
Scroll down to the Web Settings section.
In the Automatic Subtitles section, turn on Show when muted and Show when skipping backwards.

On your mobile phone or tablet:

Open the Apple TV app.
In the top right corner, tap your profile icon.
Scroll down to the Automatic Subtitles section.
Turn on “Show when muted” and “Show when going back.”

On your TV:

Open the Apple TV app.
On the home page, press left to open the menu.
Select Settings.
Under General, select Automatic Subtitles.
Turn on “Show when skipping backwards” and “Show when muted.” The latter may not be the case; it is not supported if your TV volume is controlled using an infrared remote control.

Try Apple TV audio enhancements as well.

Apple acknowledges that dialogue can sometimes be difficult to hear; this is the main reason why the subtitle skip setting exists. Apple TV also goes a step further by offering a Dialogue Enhancement feature that makes dialogue stand out more prominently.

Unfortunately, Enhance Dialogue is not available on all devices. You should see it in the Apple TV Smart TV app, for example, or when using the physical Apple TV media player (which runs on tvOS), but you won't see it on the web.

You can toggle this feature while you're watching something on Apple TV. From the playback controls, select the sound wave icon with a circle around it. The exact options you see will depend on your device. You can only see Enhance or Dialogue Enhance, which provides a standard enhancement with minimal impact on the audio mix. You can also see “Enhance More”, which makes dialogue stand out even more, albeit at the expense of more drastic changes to the audio mix.

Experiment with these options and see what works for you. This will depend on personal taste and your specific audio setup. In fact, you may find that you prefer not to use Enhance Dialogue entirely.

I think every service should have automatic subtitles. Ever since I started using it on Apple TV, I've been coveting it on other streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video. Especially when you consider that more and more people are using subtitles when watching movies and shows, it seems obvious that this is one of the reasons why Apple TV is so good.