Prime Video launches AI-generated recaps for TV shows

Amazon's Prime Video has a new AI-generated tool that will recap TV shows for you — and it's supposed to be "spoiler-free".

Announced on Monday, the streaming service's "X-Ray Recaps" use Amazon's generative AI platform Bedrock to get you up to speed with shows, whether it's a whole season, an episode, or even parts of one episode. The company says these summaries will bring up key plot moments, twists, and cliffhangers somehow without spoilers, and are "personalized down to the exact minute of where you are watching."

Say, if you wanted to catch up on what's happened in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time (because a lot happens in both), you could just pull up the Recap and select specific episodes, the previous season, or the latest season so far. Or, we've got you covered.

The Recaps, now out in beta, are an extension of Prime Video's existing "X-Ray" feature, which pulls up information about the show or film you're watching when you pause it, like cast details, production facts, songs, and statistics (if you're watching sports). You'll find the new Recaps within the X-Ray feature, or when you select "Details" on a Prime Video title.

Recaps are powered by Amazon's generative AI platform Bedrock, which runs on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and custom AI models trained on cloud-based machine-learning platform Amazon SageMaker.

According to Amazon, "X-Ray Recaps analyzes 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."

While this tool is undeniably handy, remember while you're watching your latest show to visit your own not AI-generated human pals in online journalism for critical analysis, deep dives, interviews, and reviews. Pretty please.