Prime Video users now have an AI tool that remembers — so they don't have to
With X-Ray Recap, users can have entire seasons condensed into a few detailed words.
It appears Amazon has been kicking AI operations into high gear recently. Immediately after its Prime Day event, the company launched an AI shopping guide to assist customers in making purchase decisions based on recommendations.
Now, the company has decided to introduce a new AI element to Prime Video, its video streaming service, to help users remember past events in a series they probably haven't touched in a long time.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
Starting today, some Prime Video users can access brief text summaries for entire seasons, specific episodes, or even just parts of an episode—down to the exact minute where they left off. With this, users can quickly refresh their memory before jumping right back into their favourite show.
The feature, called X-Ray Recaps, is powered by the company’s AI content cloud service, Amazon Bedrock. According to Amazon, it analyzes video segments, subtitles, and dialogue to identify and generate descriptions of key details, such as events, locations, times, and conversations.
To access these summaries, users can either check the detail page of what they're watching or read it during playback on the X-Ray experience. From there, you can then decide what type of summary you want.
Sadly, X-Ray Recaps isn’t available to everyone just yet. Right now, it’s in beta and only for Fire TV users in the US. Plus, it's only available for shows made by Amazon MGM Studios, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Wheel of Time, and my personal favourite, The Boys.
But on the bright side, Amazon also promised that this feature would roll out to support for other devices later this year.
Just over a month ago, Google rolled out an update to its NotebookLM tool that offered something similar. With the update, the tool could now generate summaries of YouTube videos. Although this was aimed at students, teachers and a more professional setting, it still bears some semblance to this.
It would be great to see other tech giants incorporate something similar in their video streaming services. Like to quickly boot up a summary for your show on Apple TV allowing you not to be bothered about whatever you might have forgotten.
That aside, with additions like this to Prime Video, it could eventually attract enough users to top the current king of streaming services, Netflix.
According to a report from Digital Trends, Amazon Prime Video currently has just over 200 million subscribers, making it the second most-subscribed streaming platform. Netflix, however, remains comfortably in the lead with over 269 million subscribers.
In the end, it'll be interesting to see if these small AI updates will have any effect on the competition, potentially shifting the balance between these streaming giants.
Fishon Amos
