Amazon has turned to AI to create recaps for TV shows on Prime Video — starting with its own original series — in a way the company says won’t risk revealing spoilers.
On Monday, Amazon announced X-Ray Recaps on Prime Video, touting the generative-AI-based feature as “delivering a new way to get up to speed without wasting time or risking spoilers.” The system creates text of “brief, easy-to-digest summaries” of full seasons of TV shows, single episodes or specific segments of episodes “down to the exact minute of where you are watching,” the company said.
At launch, Prime Video viewers can use X-Ray Recaps for all Amazon MGM Studios original series including “The Boys” (pictured above), “Upload,” “Daisy Jones & the Six,” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” and “The Wheel of Time.” X-Ray Recaps, currently in beta, is available now to users of Amazon’s Fire TV connected devices in the U.S. with support for additional devices coming by the end of the year.
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X-Ray Recaps will only summarize up to the point where a Prime Video viewer last watched a TV show — so by design, it’s built to prevent you from learning spoiler plot points.
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With X-Ray Recaps, “we’re directly addressing a common problem customers face when streaming content: forgetting where they left off,” Adam Gray, VP of product at Prime Video, said in a statement. “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.”
Here’s an example of the feature recapping “Upload” Season 2, Episodes 1-3:
X-Ray Recaps is powered by Amazon Bedrock, an AWS service for building and scaling generative AI applications with foundational models. Using a combination of Bedrock models and custom AI models trained on Amazon SageMaker, X-Ray Recaps “analyzes various video segments, combined with subtitles or dialogue, to generate detailed descriptions of key events, places, times and conversations,” according to the company.
On compatible devices, users can access X-Ray Recaps from the Prime Video detail page or during playback on the X-Ray experience. Once selected, you can choose from various types of recaps, including summaries of current episodes, the season up to the point you’ve already watched, or prior seasons.
X-Ray Recaps joins Prime Video’s existing set of X-Ray features, which let viewers dive deeper into TV shows and movies they’re watching with trivia and information about the cast, soundtrack, production details and more.
