I’m going to explain Adobe’s Enhance Speech tool and show you how to make any audio sound absolutely incredible in just one click.

You can literally take audio that was recorded on camera with no lav mic, where you can hear all the background noise and how distant the person sounds from the microphone, and turn it into something that sounds like they were wearing a mic. Same audio file. Just processed with Enhance Speech. It’s mind blowing stuff.

Also, to help save you time, I’ve created a set of free Enhance Speech presets for this tool that will help you dial in the effect and make your audio sound better even faster. You can download them completely for free.

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What Is Enhance Speech And How Does It Work?

Back in late 2022, Adobe released a tool on their website called Adobe Podcast AI Enhance Speech, and it really took the filmmaking and podcasting community by storm, because it uses AI to, as the name implies, enhance any audio file you upload to it.

If someone’s speaking and it isn’t clear, it’s insane. If your audio is too quiet, if it has too much echo, maybe your audio recorder died and the only audio you have is from your on camera mic recording someone 20 feet away across the room. It doesn’t matter. This tool could fix it. It was magical.

But it did have one big drawback, namely that to use it you have to upload your audio file to Adobe’s site. And that’s a pain, especially with a long audio file. You may have to trim it down to make it shorter, the processing takes longer, and it’s just not ideal, especially if you’re trying to edit a video quickly.

Well, I have good news, because in the Premiere Pro 24.2 update, Adobe officially added this same Enhance Speech tool directly into Premiere Pro. So now you don’t need to go to Adobe’s website and upload anything, because you can enhance the audio in your video in one click right in Premiere, and you also have control over how much enhancement you’re applying.

How To Use Enhance Speech In Premiere Pro

Start by importing some footage with audio into Premiere Pro. Or if you have separate audio files you want to import, it doesn’t matter. You just need audio, and you need to put it on your timeline.

In this case I have a clip I recorded at a wedding of a groom reading a letter, and for the sake of this demo we’re going to pretend my audio recorder failed, so all I was left with is the on camera microphone audio of the groom speaking. It’s pretty rough. It’s faint, there’s echo, there’s wind, none of it is ideal, and it would be a lot of work to finesse that audio into a wedding film.

Thankfully audio like that, which may have been completely unusable in the past, can now be saved.

To access Enhance Speech, go up to Window and enable the Essential Sound panel, which opens up this cute little panel over on the right. Then click to select the audio clip you want to enhance, and tell Premiere Pro what type of audio it is, which in this case is Dialogue.

And there it is, the Enhance Speech tool. Remember how I said we can enhance the speech in one click? Here’s the one click. Click Enhance. It does some analysis, and it’s done. Really, that fast. Premiere Pro may take a few seconds or longer depending on how long your audio track is.

And it sounds so good. So crisp, so clean. It sounds like he’s wearing a microphone.

Now, what if it didn’t sound so good? Thankfully, because we’re in Premiere Pro, we have this very helpful Mix Amount slider below the Enhance button. If you’re wondering what that means, mouse over it and it says it sets the level of enhancement applied to the original audio clip. So it’s really a way to adjust the strength of the effect.

Let’s try an experiment and crank it all the way up to ten. That is so crisp. Oh my goodness, isn’t that just a crazy effect?

That said, I do want to warn you that the higher you push this slider, the greater the chance the audio starts to sound digital and the voice it’s modulating starts sounding robotic. In my experience, setting the level to ten is pretty much a guaranteed way to make whoever’s speaking sound like an alien. So I’d only do that if you have super terrible audio and you need it recovered no matter what.

I also want you to know that the higher you set the level, the more it’s going to sound like it was recorded in a studio, meaning the voice of whoever is speaking becomes more and more prominent and the background sound becomes quieter and quieter. So if you have someone speaking with a lot of background noise, going up to level 7 or 8 or 9 may be what you have to do to clean it up. In my example it sounds like the groom is in a studio. It’s so clean, with no background audio. It’s pretty nuts.

How To Make Your Processed Audio Sound More Natural

Here’s where things get really interesting, and it may hurt your brain a little bit whenever I explain it, because it definitely hurt mine the first time I heard it.

I was filming some friends of mine as they filmed a wedding, for a behind the scenes video. Whenever the couple had their first look and saw each other for the first time, it was a really sweet moment where they were saying some really great things for the video, but it was also a very windy day and the audio needed to be cleaned up. So my friends used the Enhance Speech tool in Premiere Pro to fix it.

The issue was that when they did, the audio was cleaned up so much that it sounded like the couple was recording in a studio and not outdoors on a windy day. In short, the audio did not match the ambiance of where it was recorded.

So to fix it, my friends went in and added a subtle wind sound effect back to the audio, literally making the enhanced audio less perfect than Enhance Speech had made it. And when they did that, the video felt just right. The audio was still clear and easy to understand and significantly better than it was before, but the added wind noise made everything sound even better and significantly more natural.

So what I’m recommending may sound weird, but if you really want to dial things in properly when using Enhance Speech, it may make your audio a little too perfect, and you may have to add imperfections back to it. It’s kind of like adding film grain to a digital video clip, where filmmakers want to make the video not look so perfect.

Speaking of dialing things in, if you don’t want to go through the process of adding sound effects back over your enhanced audio, and you have audio that only needs a bit of enhancement, let’s say there’s a subtle air conditioner hum in the background of someone speaking, in that case you may be able to get away with setting the slider to only 2 or 3. That gives you a very subtle level of enhancement, and it’s something I really like. I think there’s a lot of benefit to subtly applying this effect to audio that needs it, so don’t be afraid to do that if you want to lightly improve your audio.

Grab The Free Presets

And that’s how you use the Enhance Speech tool in Premiere Pro to make your audio sound incredible.

Remember that you can still download my Enhance Speech presets. They’re going to make dialing in your settings even easier, because they give you the exact mix amount levels you need in one click, and they’re free.

Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!