Amazon‘s latest use of generative AI will be applied to its library of Prime Video originals. Thanks to a new feature called X-Ray Recaps, viewers will be able to catch up on what they missed before diving back into their favorite shows.
The recaps are built into X-Ray, the overlay Amazon Prime Video uses to identify actors as they appear on screen. The tech giant used a combination of multiple generative AI models — including those powered by AWS’ Amazon Bedrock and others trained on Amazon SageMaker — to integrate automated episode summaries into Prime Video hits like The Boys, Upload, and The Wheel of Time.
Episode summaries have never been hard to find on the internet, but the era of generative AI has unlocked new potential for customization within that format. YouTube has harnessed AI to summarize its videos, and Amazon believes that X-Ray Recaps can improve synopses in a number of ways.
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For starters, the new Prime Video summaries will be timed “down to the exact minute of where you are watching,” according to Amazon. So if you’re halfway through an episode of The Boys, X-Ray Recaps will catch up on the first 30 minutes without giving away the shenanigans Homelander is about to pull. That, Amazon says, is one of the most exciting aspects of the new feature: It’s spoiler-free, at least in theory. The AI recaps represent “a new way to get up to speed without wasting time or risking spoilers.”
X-Ray Recaps is kicking off on a select group of Amazon MGM Studios originals: The three aforementioned shows as well as Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Daisy Jones and the Six. Initially, access will be limited to Amazon Fire TV connected devices in the U.S. Per Variety, Amazon plans to expand X-Ray Recaps to other devices “by the end of the year.” So if you’re concerned that your attention span is still just a little too long, don’t worry. Amazon will make sure that you don’t waste a second of your precious TV-watching time.
