Fire TV’s Alexa search engine has up-to-date AI, but it needs some work

Navigating the enormous amount of streaming content available today can be a full-time job. Recommendations from friends, blog posts, and TikTok videos that I haven’t thought about in years are helpful. But finding something that me, my husband, my 13-year-old daughter, and my 16-year-old son would like to watch together is still a Herculean task.

So when Amazon announced new AI-powered voice search feature for Fire TVs I was intrigued at the fall event last year. Hoping that it will make searching for content easier and smarter, this will be the solution to my problems. I’ve had some time to get hands-on with the up-to-date feature, and while it shows promise, like many other AI-powered search engines, it’s simply not reliable enough to be all that useful.

The basic idea is that you can employ more natural language to ask Alexa to find something to watch. Whether you have a show in mind but can’t remember the name or aren’t sure what you want, tap the Alexa button on your Fire TV remote and ask questions like: “What is that money laundering show set in the mountains?” or “Show me British crime dramas with female leads” and the voice assistant should aid you with that. It’s the AI ​​equivalent of channel switching, only Alexa does it for you.

All of this is powered by Amazon’s up-to-date Vast Language Model (LLM), designed to display movie and TV content using natural language. We’re starting to roll out this feature to eligible Fire TV devices running Fire OS 6 or later today. When launched, it is able to search for content based on topic, genre, plot lines, actors and quotes, thanks to training on data from sites such as 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 a few questions, including: “Show me a movie where Tom Hanks is a pilot and he has to land on the Hudson River” (Sully); “What TV show mentioned McDonald’s Szechuan sauce?” (Rick and Morty); and “Show me a nature documentary narrated by Obama” (Our Great National Parks). Alexa took care of it all – but while it’s neat, I can Google it all 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. However, what I expect from a more clever search service is not something that will jog my memory, but something shrewd enough to find something good for me to watch. I want him to employ his huge data set to sift through the shell and find quality for me. I want it to be that aged school 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 is also a top salesperson at a video store . ”

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 he could continue talking to the assistant to choose movies he wouldn’t have to pay for, ones he hadn’t seen yet (or at least hadn’t seen). t in his Fire TV viewing history) that were good for his teens, and then finally ask him a context clue: “We like video games, which one should we go for?” It suggested Scott Pilgrim. Now This is very useful.

Park told me that detailed back-and-forth conversations are planned for future updates. Trying the current options, I couldn’t get it to go beyond two queries before it started falling apart. It was also tough to provide more than a few correct answers to broader questions such as “Show me Oscar-winning films from the 1970s.”

“It’s definitely day one for us,” Park explained when I asked about these limits. “We definitely have a view of what we need to do to improve it so that whatever the customer asks for, 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 get the right results. With the up-to-date Fire TV search, I was able to talk to Alexa, including pauses, ums, and ers, and (mostly) understood what I was asking.

However, I was largely disappointed with the results. To see if this might aid assess my family’s situation, I suggested the prompt “Show me some dark, violent comedies.” (I love romantic comedies and my husband loves horror movies.) It suggested Heathers, American psycho, Pulp FictionAND Barbie doll. Apart from Barbie doll being completely out of left field, everyone else was over 20 years aged. Not helpful.

At this point I decided to move on from what I thought was a softball question. Something I might ask the clerk at the video store: “Show me something good to watch.” The results were… strange. The first suggestion was this Mrs. Marple (a classic British detective series that I really love but is very aged), but his second and third options were Curious Woman AND Super Vixens, which not only looks like 1970s soft-core porn, but has very penniless ratings on IMDB.

Yes, this is really just the beginning.

Amazon says the search feature is designed to be tailored to your needs, while the Fire Stick I used at Amazon HQ obviously wasn’t. I just got a up-to-date update on my Fire Stick this morning so I was able to repeat the query “something good to watch” and I’m content to say there was no sign of curious women. Alexa suggested instead Dune: part two, Shogun AND Sugar. So it looks like I might be ready for some weekend binge-watching.