Amazon’s latest feather in the cap of its Prime Video service is a feature that recaps a series you’re watching that’s powered by AI.
X-Ray Recaps sounds like a great idea, albeit one still in beta at this point – beware, Upload spoilers are present in the above screenshot (Image Credit: Amazon)
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It’s called X-Ray Recaps, and the capability uses generative AI to create brief and easily digestible summaries of seasons of TV shows, Amazon explains.
We’ve all been there, and what with gaps of a year between seasons (or longer in some cases), it’s easy to forget what was going on in the various subplots and threads of relationships in the show you were watching.
So, you end up going on YouTube to watch somebody’s cobbled together summary of the seasons so far, some of which are pretty shabby quality-wise, it has to be said.
Amazon is aiming to provide something more reliable, and X-Ray Recaps won’t just be able to fill you in with past seasons, but even recap the current season so far. Or indeed a single episode up to the point where you left off watching, if you exited an episode in the middle (because you were nodding off, perhaps, late at night).
You’ll be able to launch the X-Ray Recaps feature from the Prime Video info page for a show, or during playback if you pause the video and go into the X-Ray interface.
As to the nuts-and-bolts of the new functionality, Amazon explains how it works:
“Utilizing a combination of Amazon 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. Guardrails are also applied to ensure the generation of spoiler-free and concise summaries.”
If it’s all that it promises to be, X-Ray Recaps should be a pretty nifty addition, incorporated right there seamlessly alongside your Prime library. That said, you won’t get the humor of something like ‘Man of Recaps’ on YouTube, of course.
And the further worry is that the AI could go wonky, as ever with anything powered by artificial intelligence.
We’ve got a sneaking suspicion Amazon is suddenly relying more on AI for some of its subtitles, because we’ve noticed of late that they seem to be full of a lot more mistakes with some of the more obscure films we’ve been watching – mistakes based on completely mishearing the words being spoken (and not errors a human listener would make).
X-Ray Recaps is currently in beta – meaning it could be patchier than expected to begin with, certainly – and it’s starting to roll out to those with Fire TV in the US from today. Amazon says that more devices will be covered by the end of the year, and we guess other regions will follow with the rollout, too.
Initially, the recap service will be available with Amazon MGM Studios original series which includes the likes of The Boys, The Wheel of Time, Mr & Mrs Smith and Reacher.