Amazon is turning to artificial intelligence for its latest ‘X-ray’ feature. Now, if you get distracted by TikTok while watching a TV show on Prime Video you’ll get a brief recap of what you missed.
Dubbed "X-Ray Recaps", the content will be personalized to your viewing habits and provide a catch-up summary up to the point you last watched. This will be in the form of "short textual snippets of key cliffhangers" and character-driven plots.
Amazon says it will generate a recap regardless of where you are watching or when you stopped watching. This includes whether you took a coffee break a few minutes in or fell asleep five minutes from the end.
Don't worry about spoilers as Amazon promises the recaps will be spoiler-free (even for its best releases), so if you do want to go back and watch the bits you missed you won't have to worry about knowing exactly what happened.
How do X-Ray recaps work?
Amazon says X-Ray Recaps are designed to help people catch up if they missed a crucial point in a show, or if they're coming back to a show after a long gap.
They are designed to be a way to see what happened without risking spoilers from an online summary or glimpsing part of the action by rewinding.
Adam Gray, vice president of product at Prime Video explained that the Recaps are 'context-aware' to the time and position in the video.
He says this allows Prime Video to "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.”
Using custom Amazon AI models trained on the video segments, subtitles and dialogue of the Prime Video library, it can create descriptions of key events, places, times and even conversations. It then applies guardrails to ensure it is spoiler-free and easy to read at a distance.
How to get X-Ray Recaps
X-Ray Recaps are available to anyone with a Prime Video account. Just go to the Prime Video detail page for the show or open the X-Ray experience during playback.
You can pick from a range of recap types including summaries of a current episode, the season so far or a previous season if you're finally watching that delayed release.
For now, it is only available as a beta release to Fire TV customers in the U.S. but Amazon says it will be on a wider range of devices by the end of the year. There are no details on an international release plan.
For now, the best shows to try it on are: "Daisy Jones and the Six", "Mr and Mrs Smith", "Wheel of Time", and "The Boys".
