Strap in, another new use for AI has arrived, and this time, its focus is on TV recaps. Prime Video has announced a new feature as part of its X-Ray experience, X-Ray Recaps. These generative AI TV series recaps are intended to help users remember where they were in a TV series without ruining the flow of their viewing experience.
In a release, Prime Video reveals:
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. 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.
Prime Video further notes that “Guardrails are also applied to ensure the generation of spoiler-free and concise summaries.” Those guardrails had better be strong. Because if this AI starts giving people spoilers, the age of AI will be over more quickly than anticipated.
You can take a look at an example of such a Prime Video AI recap below.
Notably, this is a very straightforward hash of what has transpired in an episode. Most TV recaps written online aim to inject some criticism or opinion into them—to offer the user something in addition to just a review of the straightforward story points. But the results here are a much more rote retelling of what has transpired in a series. Adam Gray, vice president of product at Prime Video, notes that this new AI TV Recap feature, “directly address[es] a common problem customers face when streaming content: forgetting where they left off.”
As a rule, we don’t like to see generative AI content come near creative properties and would prefer to see episode recaps coming from people who have watched and know the series. Not to mention, those recaps could help try to account for the experience of a user who has stopped midway. But we’ll have to wait and see what happens next here. AI aside, it will also be interesting to see whether this form of recap will prove useful to those who can’t really remember what they’ve already seen. If you don’t remember who Nathan and Ingrid are—will a summary like the above be of use? Again, a human touch could go a long way in making it so.
As to when these AI recaps will become available for all? For now, X-Ray Recaps is in beta and will now become available to Fire TV customers in the U.S., “with support for additional devices coming by the end of the year.” Users can receive X-Ray Recaps for all Amazon MGM Studios Original series like Daisy Jones and the Six, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Wheel of Time, and The Boys.“