Amazon has launched a new X-Ray Recaps feature, designed to remind you of what’s happened so far within shows you’re watching on Prime Video. Here’s how it works.
Most TV shows do a pretty decent job of recapping important happenings when heading into a new episode or season, courtesy of well-edited video primers.
There’s usually pretty intelligent context applied to these minute-or-so clips that’ll remind you of relevant storylines or characters that maybe haven’t been featured for a while, that may come up in this episode.
However, Amazon’s new tech aims to fill a gap in that equation. Maybe helping you account for a minute or two you missed? The company rationalises there’ll be some moments that have previously required you to rewind, rewatch stuff you’ve already seen, or search online for a summary. The latter carries the risk of spoilers, Amazon says.
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What do X-Ray Recaps do?
Amazon says that X-Ray Recaps use generative AI to create a personalised textual recap up of what you’ve seen and the bits you may have missed.
It could be for a summary of a full season if you can’t remember some of the finer points (again, TV editors already do a good job of this), an episode, or pieces of an episode.
“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,” Amazon says in the blog post today.
How do X-Ray Recaps work?
When you launch X-Ray Recaps from the Prime Video detail page or during playback from the X-Ray experience, you’ll be able to select from a number of options, including summaries of the current episodes, the season so far, or the previous season, Amazon says. Because of carefully constructed guardrails will ensure what’s generated by the AI is concise and spoiler-free.
“X-Ray Recaps is powered by Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed AWS service for building and scaling generative AI applications with foundational models,” Amazon says in the blog post.
“Utilising a combination of Amazon Bedrock models and custom AI models trained on Amazon SageMaker, X-Ray Recaps analyses 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.”
