Amazon Prime Video’s New Feature Will Use AI to Recap Entire Seasons of Shows for You
One cool feature that’s relatively unique to Amazon Prime Video is the streamer’s X-Ray feature, which pops up the name of an actor or the music you’re currently hearing or seeing on screen when you pause the show. No need to go to IMDB to figure out where you recognize that guy from or to Shazam that song — so long as you’re actually watching a show or movie on Amazon.
Now Amazon Prime Video is extending that X-Ray feature a step further by summarizing full episodes or even entire seasons of TV through the push of a button. The company is calling it “X-Ray Recaps,” and it’s available now in Beta version on Amazon MGM Originals and for Fire TV users specifically.
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X-Ray Recaps is powered through generative AI models trained on various video segments of shows, subtitles, and other dialogue, and it manages to generate a brief, detailed description of the key moments and even specific places, times, conversations, and character names, present in an episode or a season of TV to help you catch up. It’s like having ChatGPT on your remote, but you can only prompt it to tell you what happened last week on “The Wheel of Time.”
At any time while watching, you can pause the show and activate the feature, electing to have it summarize single episodes, the most recent season, or the entire series up to that point. It will even generate a recap of pieces of episodes so you don’t have to rewind when you stepped away for a bathroom break or to take out the dog (rude that your partner didn’t pause it for you).
X-Ray is also supposed to know how far along you’ve specifically watched and has some guardrails in place to make sure that whatever the AI generates doesn’t spoil the rest of the show for you.
The idea is that it saves you the trouble of going online and risking looking up something and reading a spoiler you didn’t want to know about. That seems like a good feature if you’re finally going back to the beginning to see what “The Boys” is all about (though we’re happy to help with this here at IndieWire. Talk about AI trying to take people’s jobs away). It also saves you the trouble of having to rewind a few minutes and re-watch stuff that you maybe already saw.
“Prime Video product and technology teams work relentlessly behind the scenes to enhance customers’ viewing experience, and with the creation of X-Ray Recaps, we’re directly addressing a common problem customers face when streaming content: forgetting where they left off,” said Adam Gray, vice president of product at Prime Video. “With this context-aware functionality, Prime Video will deliver summaries of memorable moments and important plot points so our customers can quickly jump back into what they were watching or rediscover why they fell in love with a series in the first place.”
For now, the feature is only available on Amazon MGM original shows, and the blog post announcing the tool mentions “Daisy Jones and the Six,” “The Boys,” “The Wheel of Time,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” that are making use of the tech. No word on if other older Amazon shows and movies will add it as well, or if the feature will be extended to other content licensed through Prime Video.
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