Amazon announces a new feature that is being introduced to Prime Video with the intention of helping you remember what happened in previous episodes of the series you are watching. To do this, the platform uses generative AI in a unique way that is likely to cause a sensation among users.
In this busy streaming consumption that we have today, it is not unusual to start watching series, leave them halfway and then return to them a long time later. When we do that, the chances of not remembering what happened in the last episodes are very high. For this reason, Amazon has come up with this technology with AI that wants to simplify everything. And the truth is that, for those who have Prime Video subscriptioncan be really useful as we are going to explain to you below.
It is not a simple summary
Amazon has clearly considered why anyone would use this new recap system known as X-Ray Recaps. They themselves take the bull by the horns and recognize that, if you need to refresh what has happened in a series, you may consult it online or rewind to refresh the latest events. But, starting from that obviousness, what Amazon has done has been to go further and make its system really useful.
The problem with looking online and searching for summaries is that it is often easy to lose patience searching. Many results appear on Google that have nothing to do with what we want to remember and, on the other hand, we expose ourselves to spoilers. The same thing happens if we look for a summary on YouTube. For its part, rewinding is something that makes us lazy just thinking about it. With X-Ray Recaps what Amazon does is simplify access to summaries.
To do this, from the interface we have to press the circular arrow icon with lines as you can see in the image at the top of the news and that will open the summaries menu. Next, the service offers us to get a summary of an entire season, a specific episode or an exact moment in a chapter. And this last point, which, like everything else, is still being tested, is what seems most striking to us. Because, without a doubt, it is something we did not expect. Amazon says that the goal is that, if you go to the bathroom and have forgotten to pause, or for some reason you have interrupted your session or stopped looking at the screen, you can get a summary of what happened in the last few minutes. The system is so flexible that it will allow you to specify the start and end minutes of the summary.
That dynamism when it comes to getting summaries seems like a great concept to us and something that could really change the way we get out of trouble when we need to remember a specific moment in an episode. Once requested, the summary will appear on the screen, we will be able to read it and continue playing the chapter in a satisfactory manner.
How does it work and how to use it?
The operation is complex and immerses itself in the application of different AI models. At Amazon they comment that tools such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker have been used with the intention of shaping the AIs that deal with this process. To do this, they use a deep analysis of the videos, audios and subtitles with the intention of being able to make summaries that meet user expectations. No less important, Amazon says that they have worked to detail key moments of the episodes, but avoiding spoilers. It doesn’t sound easy, so it’s something we’re eager to try.
At the moment, this X-Ray Recaps system is used in the area of ​​the X-Ray interface that we can already use to, for example, obtain data from the actors that appear on the screen. Of course, the system is being tested in the United States, so you will have to be a little patient until it spreads to other places. We must not forget that Prime Video has a huge amount of content and that technology like this surely needs a lot of work and review. For now, the project looks very interesting as a way to improve the user experience.
