Amazon’s Fire TV search has new AI, but needs improvement

Finding movies to watch with the whole family on today’s huge content store is a challenge. Thanks to suggestions from friends, blog posts, and even TikTok videos about old movies, finding the right content for the whole family including husband, wife, and two teenagers on your own is still a task. impossible.

So when Amazon introduced a new AI-powered voice search feature for Fire TV at its event last fall, I was intrigued. This feature promises to make searching for content easier and smarter, I hope it will be the solution to my problem. Now I’ve had a chance to try out this new feature, and while it shows potential, like many AI-powered search features these days, it’s still not reliable enough to be truly useful.

Essentially, you can use more natural language to ask Alexa to find content to watch. Whether you vaguely remember a show but don’t remember the name, or don’t know what you want to watch, press the Alexa button on your Fire TV remote and ask a question like, “What is this movie about money laundering that takes place in the mountains?” What?” or “Show me a British crime drama with a female lead,” your virtual assistant will help you find the answer. It’s like flipping through channels using AI, only Alexa is doing the flipping for you.

All of this is powered by a large language model (LLM) built by Amazon, designed to find movie and TV show content using natural language input. It is starting to roll out to eligible Fire TV devices running Fire OS 6 or later. At launch, it has the ability to find content based on factors like subject, genre, plot, actors, and quotes thanks to training on data from services like IMDb.

Josh Park, Senior Product Manager for Fire TV at Amazon, introduced AI search with me at Amazon’s Day 1 headquarters in Seattle earlier this month. He showed me several queries, including: “Show me the movie where Tom Hanks plays a pilot and has to land on the Hudson River” (Sully); “Which TV show mentioned McDonald’s Szechuan sauce?” (Rick and Morty); and “Show me a nature documentary narrated by Obama” (Our Great National Parks). Alexa completed all of these requests well – but the cool thing is that I was able to Google these things myself on my phone while sitting on the sofa.

Amazon adds helpful context to search results, including showing you the apps you can use to watch the show and whether it’s free for you. But what I want in a smarter search service is not something that jogs my memory, but something that’s smart enough to find me something good to watch. I want it to use my huge data set to sift through the unnecessary stuff and find me quality content. I wanted it to be like my old-time video store clerk.

When Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Fire TV, introduced the search function on stage at Amazon’s fall event last year, it was exactly what he promised, saying that using the feature This is “like talking to a great friend who happens to be the best video store employee in the world.”

His demo involved an Alexa that was much more capable than what I saw in Seattle. He asks Alexa to “find me some action movies” and can then continue chatting with the virtual assistant to narrow down his choices to movies he doesn’t need to pay for, ones he hasn’t yet. watch (or at least not in his Fire TV viewing history), movies suitable for his teens, and finally ask for a contextual hint: “We like video games , which movie should we choose?” Alexa recommends Scott Pilgrim. Now this is useful.