Amazon has introduced a new recap feature that leverages artificial intelligence to help streamers quickly refresh their memories about prior seasons of TV shows.
The feature, called X-Ray Recaps, is billed as a way to quickly catch up to an in-progress show or one that might have been on hiatus for several months, without the risk of spoilers.
“X-Ray Recaps is a generative AI-powered feature that creates brief, easy-to-digest summaries of full seasons of TV shows, single episodes, and even pieces of episodes, all personalized down to the exact minute of where you are watching,” Amazon said on Monday. “Whether you’re a few minutes into a new episode, halfway through a season, or took a break from watching a series and need a refresher, X-Ray Recaps delivers short textual snippets of key cliffhangers, character-driven plot points, and other details that can be accessed at any point in your viewing experience.”
Adam Gray, the Vice President of Product at Prime Video, said X-Ray Recaps is intended to help viewers remember where they left off in a show.
“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,” Gray noted.
In an online post, Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios executive Mike Hopkins said the feature will go beyond recaps, leveraging AI tools to deliver trivia, character insights, soundtrack and production details that “enrich the viewer experience.”
“Our product and technology teams work hard to find new ways to deliver the latest and greatest in streaming service innovation for our customers,” Hopkins said.
X-Ray Recaps is the latest tool built via Amazon Bedrock, a fully-managed service backed by Amazon Web Solutions (AWS) that helps software developers build and scale generative AI applications with foundational models.
“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,” Amazon said. “Guardrails are also applied to ensure the generation of spoiler-free and concise summaries.”
Streamers can get X-Ray Recaps across supported TV shows and films within the Prime Video app by visiting the content’s details page, or by calling up the X-Ray feature while watching a show or movie.
