Amazon Prime Video Now Testing AI-Powered Story Recaps

Amazon Prime Video is rolling out a new feature called X-Ray Recaps. These use generative AI to give viewers personalized summaries of their favorite TV shows.

The X-Ray Recap feature was made to help viewers who forgot plot details or missed crucial moments while watching a series. X-Ray Recaps can give brief summaries of full seasons, individual episodes, or even specific segments tailored to the exact point in the viewing experience. The summaries can focus on key cliffhangers, character-driven plot points, and other significant details so that viewers are brought up to speed without having to rewind or search online for information.

The company says this is using Amazon Bedrock, a managed AWS service for building generative AI applications. By combining Amazon Bedrock models and custom AI models trained on Amazon SageMaker, X-Ray Recaps analyzes video segments and subtitles or dialogue to create detailed descriptions of key events, locations, timings, and conversations.

The system uses safeguards to avoid spoilers while making its summaries. Although, technically, summarizing any point is a spoiler, this may just be to make sure the AI doesn’t give too much away. There’s no mention of how Amazon plans to combat AI Hallucination, in which AI makes things up to answer a user’s request. Otherwise, it can be easy for AI to make plot details up just to help a user.

X-Ray Recaps builds on Prime Video’s existing X-Ray feature, which provides viewers with additional information about the show or movie, like trivia, cast details, soundtrack information, and production insights. You can access the X-Ray feature by pausing whatever you’re watching and finding it in the menu at the bottom of the screen.

The new feature is in beta and being rolled out to Fire TV customers in the United States. It is planned to be available on additional devices by the end of the year. At launch, X-Ray Recaps supports all Amazon MGM Studios Original series, including Daisy Jones and the Six, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Wheel of Time, and The Boys.

Source: Amazon