Navigating the vast amount of streaming content available today can be a full-time job. Recommendations from friends, blog posts, and TikToks of movies I haven’t thought of in years help. But finding something that me, my husband, my 13-year-old daughter, and my 16-year-old son want to watch together is still a herculean task.
So when Amazon announced its new AI voice search feature for Fire TV at last year’s fall event, I was intrigued. With its promise to make searching for content easier and smarter, I hoped it would be the solution to my problems. I’ve had a little practice with the new feature now, and while it’s promising, like a lot of AI searches right now, it’s just not reliable enough to be all that useful.
The basic idea is that you can use more natural language and ask Alexa to find you something to look at. Whether you have a show in mind but can’t remember the title or aren’t sure what you’re in the mood for, tap the Alexa button on your Fire TV remote and ask questions like, “What’s this show about money laundering? in the mountains?” or “Show me British crime dramas with female leads” and the voice assistant should help you figure it out. It’s the AI equivalent of channel surfing, only Alexa does the flipping for you.
It’s all powered by a new Large Language Model (LLM) built at Amazon, designed to display movie and TV content using natural language inputs. It’s starting to roll out today to eligible Fire TV devices running Fire OS 6 or higher. At launch, it can find content based on things like theme, genre, plot, actors, and quotes by training on data from services like IMDb.
Amazon’s Joshua Park, senior product manager for Fire TV, showed me AI search earlier this month at Amazon’s Day 1 headquarters in Seattle. He showed me several queries, including: “Show me a movie where Tom Hanks is a pilot and has to land on the Hudson” (Sully); “What TV show mentions Szechuan sauce from McDonald’s?” (Rick and Morty); and “Show me a nature documentary narrated by Obama” (Our great national parks). Alexa has done a good job with all of this – but while it’s neat, it’s all I can google on my phone while sitting on the couch.
Amazon adds useful context to the results, including showing you what apps you have that can stream the show and whether it’s free for you. But what I don’t want from a more intelligent search service is not something to jog my memory, but something smart enough to find something good to watch. I want him to use his vast data set to scour the cruft and find me quality stuff. I want it to be the old video salesman from my youth.
When Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, demonstrated the search feature on stage at Amazon’s fall event last year, he literally promised it, saying that using the feature is “like talking to a great friend who’s also the best video salesman in the world.” ”
His demo included a much more capable Alexa than I saw in Seattle. He asked Alexa to “find me some action movies” and then he could continue talking to the assistant to convert it to movies he wouldn’t have to pay for, ones he hadn’t (or at least hadn’t) seen yet. tv his Fire TV viewing history), the ones that were good for his teenagers, and finally ask them for a contextual clue: “Do we like video games, which one should we go to?” It suggested Scott Pilgrim. Now that it is very useful.
I could have a conversational chat with Alexa, including pauses and ums and ers, and she (mostly) understood what I was asking
Park tells me that some kind of in-depth back-and-forth is planned for future updates. In the time I’ve tried the current options, I haven’t been able to get it past two queries before it starts to break. It also tried to offer more than a few correct answers to broader questions like “Show me Oscar movies from the 1970s.”
“It’s definitely early days for us,” Park explained when I asked about those limits. “We definitely have an overview of what we need to do to make it better, so no matter what the customer is asking, we’re able to find the right content for them.”
What it does do well is improve the current state of Alexa voice search, which – like most voice commands – requires specific nomenclature to turn up the right results. Thanks to Fire TV’s new search, I could have a conversational chat with Alexa, including pauses and um and er, and she (mostly) understood what I was asking.
But the results disappointed me to a great extent. To see if this might help with my family’s viewing, I suggested a “Show me some dark comedies with violence” challenge. (I love romantic comedies and my husband loves horror movies.) It offered Heathers, american psychopath, Pulp Fictionand Barbie. except Barbie they were completely out of the field, the others were over 20 years old. Not helpful.
Next, I tried something much more specific. We like to find series to watch together, so I asked, “Show me a TV series with more than six episodes that is highly rated.” It suggested two shows, both anime. One was rated a nine out of 10, but the other was a five out of 10. Not a great score even for an avid anime fan.
At this point I decided to go for what I thought was going to be a softball question. The thing I could have asked the video store clerk: “Show me something good to watch.” The results were… bizarre. His first proposal was Miss Marple (a classic British detective story that I really love but it’s very old) but her second and third options were Curious woman and Super Vixens, which not only look like soft-core porn from the 70s, but have a very bad rating on IMDB.
Yes, it really is still early. Amazon spokesperson Ashley Aruda addressed the issues I experienced with “relevance of search results” after I published this during my demo were solved. She noted that the version I was testing was not the one shipped to customers today.
I tested AI Search on May 3rd, about three weeks ago, on a Fire Stick at Amazon HQ. I got an update on my Fire Stick this morning so I could repeat the “something good to see” query. I am happy to say that there was no sign of the curious females. She suggested Alexa instead Dune: Part Two, Shogun and Sugar. So it looks like I’m ready for a weekend of watching.
Updated May 30: Added that Amazon reached out after publication to note that I was testing an earlier version of the search feature, not the one that ships to users today, and that the company is optimistic that the issues I experienced have been resolved.