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 about in years all 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-based voice search feature for Fire TV at its fall event last year, I was intrigued. With its promise to make searching for content easier and smarter, I was hoping it would be the solution to my problems. I’ve already spent some time with the new feature, and while it’s promising, like most AI-powered 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 to ask Alexa to find you something to watch. Whether you have a show in mind but can’t remember the name 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 that show about washing money 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 flipping, only Alexa does the flipping for you.
All of this is powered by a new Large Language Model (LLM) created by Amazon, designed to infer the content of movies and TV shows using natural language inputs. It starts rolling out to eligible Fire TV devices running Fire OS 6 or later today. At launch, it’s capable of finding content based on things like theme, genre, plot points, actors and quotes, thanks to being trained on data from services like IMDb.
Amazon’s Joshua Park, senior product manager for Fire TV, demonstrated AI search to 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 is a pilot and has to land on the Hudson” (Sully); “What is the TV show that mentions McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce?” (Rick and Morty); and Show Me the Nature Documentary Narrated by Obama (Our great national parks). Alexa did a good job with all of this – but while it’s fine, it’s all the stuff I can Google on my phone while sitting on the couch.
Amazon adds useful context to the results, including showing you which apps you have that can stream and whether it’s free for you. But what I want from a smarter search service isn’t something to jog my memory, but something smart enough to find me something good to watch. I want it to use its massive data set to sift through the craziness and find me the quality stuff. I want it to be that old school video store salesman from my youth.
When Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV, demonstrated the Scene Search feature at Amazon’s fall event last year, he literally promised, saying that using the feature is “like talking to a great friend who is also the most the best seller in the video store world. ”
His demo featured a much more capable Alexa than the one I saw in Seattle. He asked Alexa to “find me some action movies,” and then managed to continue talking to the assistant to direct him to movies he wouldn’t have to pay for, ones he hadn’t seen yet (or at least not were)t in his Fire TV viewing history), ones that were good for his teens, and then finally ask him for a contextual cue: “We like video games, which one should we choose?” This suggested Scott Pilgrim. Now that is very useful.
I could chat conversationally with Alexa, including pauses and um and er, and she (mostly) understood what I asked
Park told me that a kind of in-depth back-and-forth is planned for future updates. While testing the current capabilities, I couldn’t get it to go beyond two requests before it started to crash. It also struggled to offer more than a few correct answers to broader queries like “Show me Oscar-winning movies from the 1970s.”
“It’s definitely day one for us,” Park explained when I asked about those restrictions. “We definitely have an idea of what we need to do to make it better so that no matter what the customer wants, we can 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 bring up the right results. With Fire TV’s new search, I could have a conversational conversation with Alexa, including pauses and ums and errs, and it (mostly) understood what I asked.
But I was largely disappointed with the results. To see if it might help with my family’s viewing situation, I offered the prompt “Show me some violent dark comedies.” (I love romantic comedies and my husband loves horror movies.) It was available Heathers, American psychopath, Criminaland Barbie. Furthermore Barbie because they were completely out of left field, the others were over 20 years old. Not helpful.
Then I tried something much more specific. We like to find series we can watch together, so I asked, “Show me TV series with more than six episodes that are highly rated.” It offered two shows, both anime. One was rated a nine out of 10, but the other was a five out of 10. Even for an avid anime fan, that’s not a great score.
At this point I decided to go for what I thought would be a softball question. Something I might have asked the video store clerk: “Show me something good to watch.” The results were…weird. His first suggestion was Miss Marple (a classic British detective show that I really like but it’s very old) but the second and third options were The curious woman and super vixens, which not only look like soft-core porn from the 70s, but have very poor ratings on IMDB.
Yes, it’s really early. Amazon spokesperson Ashley Arruda got in touch after I posted this to say the issues I was having around the “relevance of search results” during my demonstration are addressed. She noted that the version I was testing was not the one that was shipped to customers today.
I tested AI search on May 3, about three weeks ago, on a Fire Stick at Amazon headquarters. I got the update on my Fire Stick this morning, so I was able to repeat the “something good to watch” request. I am happy to say that there was no sign of any curious women. Alexa suggested instead Dune: Part Two, Shogun and sugar. So it looks like I might be ready for weekend viewing.
Updated May 30: It added that Amazon got in touch after the post to note that I was testing an earlier version of the search feature, not the one that’s being shipped to users today, and that the company is optimistic that the issues I had have been resolved .