Prime Video: Amazon invites AI into series with a new feature

Since November 4, 2024, Amazon has launched a new X-Ray function in the United States on its streaming platform Prime Videousing artificial intelligence to create series summaries and help viewers not lose track of a plot.

A function without risk of spoilers

With X-Ray Recaps, Prime Video now offers access to a short text summarizing an entire season of a series, individual episodes or specific segments of episodes. These summaries are accessible from the home page of a content or during viewing.

These are therefore not video montages concocted by an AI with an approximate voiceover and summarizing a seriesas one might have feared, but many summaries designed not to spoil the user's pleasure.

Amazon's promise is that this function does not spoil content, because it only provides summaries up to the point where the viewer has stopped watching. So, if you are at the 10th minute of episode 5 of season 2 of The BoysX-Ray Recaps doesn't summarize the series for you beyond this point.

At this time, X-Ray Recaps is only offered on Amazon MGM Studios shows, such as The Boys, Upload, The Wheel of Time Or Mr. & Mrs. Smithand only on Fire TV systems in the United States, but it should arrive on other media by the end of the year.

“We're directly addressing a common problem customers face when streaming content: forgetting where they left offAdam Gray, vice president of products at Prime Video, said in a statement. With this contextual feature, Prime Video will provide summaries of memorable moments and important plot points so our customers can quickly get back to what they were watching or rediscover why they loved a series in the first place.”

As our colleagues at VarietyX-Ray Recaps is powered by Amazon Bedrock, an AWS service for building and scaling AI applications. The feature uses a combination of Bedrock models and custom AI trained on Amazon SageMaker to, as the company states, “analyze various video segments combined with subtitles or dialogue to generate detailed descriptions of key times, places, moments and conversations.”

X-Ray Recaps thus joins other X-Ray functions already available on Prime Video and which notably allow access to more information about a movie or a series (details around the casting, the soundtrack or the technical team).