Amazon Prime Video Introduces AI-Powered 'AI Topics' for Enhanced Content Discovery

What's Next? Prime Video's New AI Recommends Your Dream Watchlist

The era of endless scrolling is over. With AI-powered recommendation engines, streaming services like Prime Video are transforming the way we discover new content. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, these platforms are able to curate personalized recommendations, making it easier than ever to find your next favorite show or movie. Unlike the former versions of AI-powered Recommendations, this one does not just use the information netizens keep about themselves to guess what they want. Knowing which get going, the history of viewing preferences, and when exactly to watch most will create accurate recommendations. Imagine having a digital twin that knows when to empower action-packed thrillers or exudes that warm, fuzzy feeling of a romantic comedy. This AI goes beyond the usual in-depth recommendations for:

Prime Video's new AI will help you figure out what to watch next

Finding TV shows and movies to watch on Amazon's video streaming service is about to get a little easier. Have you ever scrolled Prime Video trying to find the perfect thing to watch but couldn't settle on something? Amazon is rolling out a new tool to help you find content you'll love. Called AI Topics, the feature uses AI to review your watch history and get an understanding of what you enjoy. It then analyzes thousands of shows and movies from Prime Video's library and groups those titles into relevant topics to choose from. On your Prime Video home page, you'll see topics curated based on your viewing history - topics like "fantasy quests," "whimsical journeys," "historical epics," "love entanglements," or "mind-bending sci-fi." Select one, and you'll see movies, shows, and linear channels based on that topic. Choose a title to start watching, or continue refining content with more topics. You can refine your search several times. Another option, Amazon explains, is selecting "explore more topics" on the home page or any topic page to see a new set of topics. Algorithms have powered content recommendations on streaming services for years, but Amazon is the first to advertise AI recommendations that give the viewer a little control as to where those recommendations lead. Just last month, the service introduced AI-powered summaries that can catch you up on a show without spoiling anything. Amazon's announcement noted the use of "state-of-the-art large language models" but it didn't say which ones. The company just introduced "Nova," its own foundation model, earlier this month; the company added that it has over 1,000 AI applications in progress. Also: Prime Video now offers AI-generated show recaps - but no spoilers Amazon says this feature is currently in a limited release to select customers. It will be rolling out to more users, including Fire TV, in the next few weeks.

Prime Video is testing a great new feature that'll use AI to better recommend movies and shows

Categories and descriptions are created by a large language model Amazon has come up with a modern solution to an age-old problem: how do you find something to watch when there are so many options? It's not exclusively a streaming problem but the huge amount of choice on the best streaming services has made it considerably worse - so Amazon wants to fix it with the power of AI. The new feature is called 'AI Topics' and for the moment it's exclusive to US Prime Video users. It won't be on every US TV or streaming box, though as it's a limited beta release for "select customers". If you're one of those customers you should see the new 'AI Topics' section when you scroll down. From there, you can get some AI-powered help to find your next favorite best Prime Video show or best Prime Video movie. Amazon's system analyzes your viewing to create a selection of recommendations from Prime Video's vast catalog based on that history, organized into individual topics. You can watch a recommended title by clicking on it, or explore the topic in more detail to refine the recommendations. 'AI Topics' will also generate descriptive names for the topics it identifies. Amazon gives examples including 'mind-bending sci-fI' and 'fantasy quests'. Other topics might include classic comedies, 'spine-chilling suspense' or 'frontier justice'. And when a topic is generated, 'AI Topics' will also generate related topics to widen the recommendations a little further. Here's how that works in practice. If you watch a lot of thrilling movies, Amazon's AI might create a topic of 'Thrilling Character Journeys' featuring the likes of Jack Ryan, The Batman, Inception, Memento and The Shawshank Redemption. They're all very different movies but you can see the thread the AI has used to select them. Below that you've got the additional topics, which just appear as clickable phrases: 'Spider Universe', 'Real Life Transformations', 'Vengeance Thrillers', 'Dark Delights' and so on. And immediately below that there are more recommendations for the current topic, in this example Se7en, Thirteen Lives, Widow and Joker. You might quibble with some of the choices here, or the descriptions - aren't most movies supposed to be 'Thrilling Character Journeys'? - but it's a rare streaming subscriber who hasn't spent far too much time scrolling, and this should make that a bit less likely. AI is clearly going to be an increasing part of our entertainment experience. So if Amazon's looking for more ideas, here's one: AI-powered ad placement. Imagine ads that happen like TV ones used to, with the ads appearing at sensible times rather than just randomly interrupting key scenes with: 'hello [I don't care if the hero is gasping his last] buy a kindle'. Just a thought...

Amazon Prime's AI Will Now Drive Your Entertainment Choices | AI News

Amazon's new feature in Prime Video solves the classic 21st-century problem, the abundance of choice. They have released a new feature called AI Topics, which uses AI to group content and topics based on your interests and watch history. This is then recommended to help you watch relevant shows and movies. "With the help of AI, we're able to analyse thousands of shows and movies across Prime Video's vast library of premium content and group those titles into relevant topics for customers," said Adam Gray, VP of product at Prime Video. "The end result is a highly personalised content recommendation experience that gives customers control over their discovery journey." The feature is available as a limited beta release to select customers on the Prime Video home page. In the coming weeks, Amazon mentioned that it will arrive to select living room devices in the U.S., including Fire TV. AI Topics will let you review the curated topics and then will present you with 'an assortment of series, movies, and linear channels that will appear alongside additional related topics.' They also mentioned that the features were built using LLMs and Amazon Bedrock. Last month, Amazon also announced a new feature called X-Ray Recaps, which uses generative AI to generate 'easy-to-digest summaries of full seasons of TV shows, single episodes, and even pieces of episodes, all personalised down to the exact minute of where you are watching.' The entertainment industry is set to go through a major change with the advent of generative AI. Recently, the Walt Disney Company's new business unit was reported to drive the company's efforts in AI and extended reality (XR) applications across its film, TV, and theme park divisions. Even James Cameron recently revealed that he has been using AI to assist with the production of films such as 'Avatar: The Way of Water'. "We were using machine deep learning to generate algorithms that were speeding us up and giving us better work for the past eight years or so," he said in an interview with Business Think.

Amazon's Prime Video pushes 'AI Topics' instead of the old algorithms

Streaming services like Netflix have long used machine learning algorithms to spit out recommendations based on viewing history. But with this announcement, it seems like Prime Video is putting an extra AI spin on things -- which isn't very surprising given the hype surrounding the tech and Amazon's own efforts to portray itself as an AI leader. For now, Amazon says AI Topics are rolling out to "select" living room devices in the US, such as the Fire TV.