For Fire TV users in the U.S., Amazon is enhancing its search functionality and accompanying personalized content recommendations with a voice-activated, GenAI-powered feature that lets viewers find TV show and movie options using speech language and phrases.
To coincide with the 10th anniversary of Fire TV, Amazon on Thursday announced an AI-powered update to the Alexa search experience. The feature is now available in English to US customers on select Fire TV devices with FOS6 or higher, and will be available on all eligible Fire TV devices in the US in the coming weeks.
The search feature is powered by a large-scale language model (LLM) built by Amazon, which works through Alexa prompts. In a blog post explaining the update, Amazon said viewers can search for entertainment recommendations “the same way you would ask a friend who has encyclopedic knowledge of TV shows and movies.”
Consumers can ask for suggestions based on topic, genre, plot, characters, actors and quotes, using natural language and complex or nuanced phrases. This is useful when viewers only have a vague idea of what they want to watch, or need assistance surfacing specific titles of TV shows or movies that interest them, but can't remember the name or know where they can watch it.
Example searches provided by Amazon include “Show me movies about friendship between dogs and humans,” “Show me psychological thrillers with surprise endings,” and “What movies have the line, 'Smalls, are you going to kill me?'”
Fire TV customers can search using nuanced, complex language and see relevant content recommendations. (Amazon Fire TV)
The resulting list of personalized choices is pulled from the content libraries of other streaming apps on the Fire TV platform, including Amazon's Prime Video, other SVODs like Hulu and Netflix, and free streaming options from FAST services like Amazon's Freevee, Paramount's Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel. The resulting list shows which app or service the recommended title is available in and highlights free content with ads where applicable. Fire TV also shows a separate additional row below the recommended voice search results, including free short-form content from Fire TV Channels, an embedded free TV experience launched last year.
Improved search, content discovery and personalized recommendations will help solve consumers' streaming pain points, many of whom suffer from choice fatigue including unattractive recommendations, a glut of programming options and fragmentation of which services or where specific content is available at a given time.
Nielsen addressed this issue last year in its State of 2023 report, revealing that viewers spend an average of more than 10 minutes searching for something to watch when they don't have anything in particular in mind, and one in five have stopped watching TV altogether because they didn't know what to watch and browsed and found nothing.Similarly, survey data from Hub Entertainment Research earlier this year showed that only 10% of respondents said streaming services' recommendations were always aligned with their interests, suggesting there is room for improvement in providing tailored recommendations to viewers.
Amazon isn't the only company looking to use AI to improve entertainment experiences. Google's YouTube is using AI to improve CTV advertising experiences. Last year, YouTube began testing AI-powered ad breaks in its CTV app, and early results showed that with fewer but longer ad breaks, more than half of viewers would extend their viewing session by nearly 30%.
The article has been updated to clarify that individual rows of Fire TV Channel content, such as short-form content, will not include recommended content results from the new AI-powered voice search feature.
