diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index b08659f6..3fbfe582 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@
   * Extend URI support for Tesseract with libcurl
   * Abort LSTM training with integer model (fixes issue #1573)
   * Update documentation
+  * Make automake builds less noisy by default
 
 2019-12-26 - V4.1.1
   * Implemented sw build (cppan is depreciated)
diff --git a/Makefile.am b/Makefile.am
index 39c41305..ed3fa0ca 100644
--- a/Makefile.am
+++ b/Makefile.am
@@ -1,8 +1,4 @@
 ## run autogen.sh to create Makefile.in from this file
-
-# Be less noisy by default. Can be overridden with `make V=1`.
-V = 0
-
 ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4
 
 if ENABLE_TRAINING
diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index e71bede2..147c3a6d 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -76,6 +76,10 @@ AM_CONDITIONAL([OSX], false)
 AM_CONDITIONAL([GRAPHICS_DISABLED], false)
 AC_SUBST([AM_CPPFLAGS])
 
+# Be less noisy by default.
+# Can be overridden with `configure --disable-silent-rules` or with `make V=1`.
+AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])
+
 OPENCL_INC="/opt/AMDAPP/include"
 OPENCL_LIBS="-lOpenCL"
 #############################