Amazon Fire TV using AI to do what Google TV’s voice search started doing years ago

Ben Schoon | May 30 2024 - 8:58 am PT

Voice search is a key aspect of any smart TV platform, but how capable it is varies wildly from platform to platform. This week, Amazon has announced that it will use AI to enhance Fire TV voice search, but all of the examples are things that Google TV can already do.

In a post today, Amazon has announced that it will use AI on Fire TV to enhance voice search. This will allow users to ask more complex questions about content they want to search for. This includes searching by genre, by plot lines, and even by quoting specific lines from a TV show or movie.

Amazon says this new experience “reinvents” voice search on Fire TV and leverages an “Amazon-built large language model (LLM).”

Examples of this new AI voice search include:

“…show me movies about dog and human friendships.”
“Show me psychological thrillers with surprise endings.”
“What movie has the line, ‘You’re killing me Smalls?’”
“Find sci-fi TV shows about time travel.”
“Show me classic comedy series about roommates.”
“Find Korean horror films.”
“Find me medical drama shows.”
“Find the mystery movie set on a private island.”
“Show me movies where people get sucked into a video game.”
“What movie has the line, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates?’”
“Find me the show where someone says, ‘Winter is coming.’”

If that all sounds familiar, it’s because Google Assistant on Android TV and Google TV has had similar capabilities for years now. The voice assistant first debuted on the platform back in 2017 and one of Google’s first examples was to find “TV shows set in New York.” All of the examples from Amazon fit into what Google Assistant has been doing on TVs.

Of course, there is one factor to consider here. While Google TV has been able to do all of this for years, Google Assistant has gotten noticeably worse at these sorts of tasks over time. Where Amazon’s example of “What movie has the line, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates?’” used to result in a movie listing on Google TV, it now just pulls up YouTube videos (as do some of the other examples). But, “What movie has the line, ‘You’re killing me Smalls?’” worked flawlessly.

So things are a bit hit or miss nowadays, as has been the case with Assistant as a whole for the past year or two. But, it sounds like Amazon’s new effort isn’t perfect either. The Verge reports that early testing was “not helpful.”

Amazon says that the new AI-powered voice search on Fire TV is rolling out to customers using “select” devices in the US running Fire OS 6 or later, and it will expand to all compatible devices “in the coming weeks.”