AI Dialogue Enhancement in Premiere Pro 2024

Editors have to work with whatever audio they’re given, whether it’s recorded well or not. If you’ve been given some dialogue that’s noisy or poorly captured, it can be time consuming to clean it up. Fortunately, Adobe has unveiled a new tool to help with this – AI Dialogue Enhancement.

Let’s look at how it works, some potential scenarios you could use it in, and get our professional advice on how you could use it to get the best results. Before we jump in, make sure you have Adobe Premiere Pro Version 24.3 or above to follow along with this article.

Voice Over Clean Up

First, you’ll need to open the Essential Sound Panel, where you can access the AI audio enhancement tools. You can find this by selecting the ‘Window’ drop down menu, and then choosing ‘Essential Sound’.

Once you’ve opened this up, you can select an audio clip, and categorize it as one of the options – in this case, we’ve selected some voice over, so we’ll choose ‘dialogue’.

Among the list of options, you can now find the ‘Enhance Speech’ button. Click it to see how the tool affects the clip you’ve selected. Below are 2 clips of the same voice over. Have a listen to the unprocessed dialogue first (headphones recommended):

 

Not bad. The audio has been recorded well by Chris, but let’s see how the AI tool enhances it. We’ll select the clip, and enable Enhance Speech. Listen to the voice over now:

 

The enhanced version sounds a little bit more clear, as if there is no room reverberation happening. This is more podcast-like in a way – when you think of your favorite podcasts that you listen to, they generally sound something like this.

However, it can tend to sound a little bit robotic. If you find that’s the case, you can always go to the mix amount and dial it to less or more. Play around with the settings to make it sound as natural as possible.

Noise Isolation

Here’s another scenario: you have some well recorded audio, but there’s a constant noise in the background. How well does the tool work isolating the dialogue from the background noise? Listen to this clip of Chris talking in a loud kitchen:

 

You can hear what’s being said, but it sounds really unprofessional. Let’s try using the dialogue enhancer, turned up to it’s max setting:

 

It’s impressive how well the tool drowns out the fan noise, but at the expense of naturalness. Chris almost sounds like a completely AI generated voice in this clip; let’s see what we can do about that.

Improving Naturalness

Here’s one trick you can use to make the voice sound more natural, apart from changing the tool to a lower setting. Copy the audio to a track below, turn off the isolation tool, and lower the volume by 10-15 Db, depending on the volume of your audio.

This is something you’ll need to play with, as you’re going to be re-introducing the noise that you were trying to remove in the first place. In our case, we had to re-introduce quite a lot of noise to get the voice to sound more natural, which was problematic in this case. That leaves us with the difficult choice of choosing the lesser of the two evils — robotic-sounding voices or lots of noise. All the more reason to be sure we capture good audio on set, or record ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement), but that’s a story for another day.

Have a listen to how our example sounds now:

 

Wrap Up

If there’s one thing to learn, it’s to use this tool with a light touch. You want to find the balance between what is sounding better and clearer and also not losing the natural cadence of what’s supposed to be happening in the audio that you have.

For more Premiere tips, check out our training page, where you can access free and premium training to match your editing goals.