Amazon's new AI Kindle feature is so useful, it's a shame it's not actually on a Kindle

Amazon has announced Ask this Book, a Kindle feature that uses AI to help you get information about the book you're reading. It's designed to be spoiler free, allowing readers to ask about the plot, characters and other details.

It's a pain then you're reading a tome like Game of Thrones and you can't remember how a particular Hedge Knight fits into the story, for example. So, this new feature from Amazon uses the skills of AI to do something useful and should help readers who get a little lost.

One of the disadvantages of digital reading is that it's harder to refer to appendices and in large books with lots of characters, sometimes you need to refer to these additions to keep up with what's happening. But now, AI can take care of that for you.

While that sounds great, there's a slight problem: it's currently only available on the Kindle app on iOS – and in the US, at that. It will be coming to Android and more interestingly, Amazon says that it's coming to Kindle devices too, which feels like it's a lot more significant.

While it's not explicitly stated, it would be fair to assume that Ask this Book is a cloud function, so readers will need a connection to access it. But, it's also interesting that authors and publishers cannot opt out of the service, with the suspicion that Amazon is training its AI model on all the books Kindle has access to.

From a customer perspective it's a useful feature, but it's easy to understand how a publisher might feel that exposure to the AI could lead to misuse of the copyrighted content in the future.

Kindle also offers recaps

If there was any doubt that Kindle's AI was ingesting books in the background, a Recap feature was also announced earlier in the year. It is designed to help readers get back up to speed on a series they've been reading.

The feature – also only available in the US at present – means that if you return to a story, you can get a recap of what's happened. This could be really useful if you can't remember what happened previously to a character.

Again, this requires AI to have understood what's happening in the books to then bring the reader back up to speed on what's already occurred, a little like "previously on…" which is a common feature for TV series.

In addition to these Kindle AI features, Amazon is in the process of rolling-out Alexa+ with a wider expansion expected in 2026, while the Amazon shopping experience has now also been enhanced with Rufus AI, where customers can ask questions about a particular product when browsing and buying.