8.6 KiB
summary, read_when, title, sidebarTitle
| summary | read_when | title | sidebarTitle | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image, video, music, speech, and media-understanding capabilities at a glance |
|
Media overview | Media overview |
OpenClaw generates images, videos, and music, understands inbound media (images, audio, video), and speaks replies aloud with text-to-speech. All media capabilities are tool-driven: the agent decides when to use them based on the conversation, and each tool only appears when at least one backing provider is configured.
Live speech uses the Talk session contract instead of the one-shot media tool
path. Talk has three modes: provider-native realtime, local or streaming
stt-tts, and transcription for observe-only speech capture. Those modes
share provider catalogs, event envelopes, and cancellation semantics with
telephony, meetings, browser realtime, and native push-to-talk clients.
Capabilities
Create and edit images from text prompts or reference images via `image_generate`. Synchronous — completes inline with the reply. Text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video via `video_generate`. Async — runs in the background and posts the result when ready. Generate music or audio tracks via `music_generate`. Async on shared providers; ComfyUI workflow path runs synchronously. Convert outbound replies to spoken audio via the `tts` tool plus `messages.tts` config. Synchronous. Summarize inbound images, audio, and video using vision-capable model providers and dedicated media-understanding plugins. Transcribe inbound voice messages through batch STT or Voice Call streaming STT providers.Provider capability matrix
| Provider | Image | Video | Music | TTS | STT | Realtime voice | Media understanding |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alibaba | ✓ | ||||||
| BytePlus | ✓ | ||||||
| ComfyUI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| DeepInfra | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Deepgram | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| ElevenLabs | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| fal | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Gradium | ✓ | ||||||
| Local CLI | ✓ | ||||||
| Microsoft | ✓ | ||||||
| MiniMax | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Mistral | ✓ | ||||||
| OpenAI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| OpenRouter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Qwen | ✓ | ||||||
| Runway | ✓ | ||||||
| SenseAudio | ✓ | ||||||
| Together | ✓ | ||||||
| Vydra | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| xAI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Xiaomi MiMo | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Async vs synchronous
| Capability | Mode | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Image | Synchronous | Provider responses return in seconds; completes inline with reply. |
| Text-to-speech | Synchronous | Provider responses return in seconds; attached to the reply audio. |
| Video | Asynchronous | Provider processing takes 30 s to several minutes; slow queues can run up to the configured timeout. |
| Music (shared) | Asynchronous | Same provider-processing characteristic as video. |
| Music (ComfyUI) | Synchronous | Local workflow runs inline against the configured ComfyUI server. |
For async tools, OpenClaw submits the request to the provider, returns a task id immediately, and tracks the job in the task ledger. The agent continues responding to other messages while the job runs. When the provider finishes, OpenClaw wakes the agent with the generated media paths so it can tell the user and, when required by source-delivery policy, relay the result through the message tool. For message-tool-only group/channel routes, OpenClaw treats missing message-tool delivery evidence as a failed completion attempt and sends the generated media fallback directly to the original channel.
Speech-to-text and Voice Call
Deepgram, DeepInfra, ElevenLabs, Mistral, OpenAI, SenseAudio, and xAI can all transcribe
inbound audio through the batch tools.media.audio path when configured.
Channel plugins that preflight a voice note for mention gating or command
parsing mark the transcribed attachment on the inbound context, so the shared
media-understanding pass reuses that transcript instead of making a second
STT call for the same audio.
Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Mistral, OpenAI, and xAI also register Voice Call streaming STT providers, so live phone audio can be forwarded to the selected vendor without waiting for a completed recording.
For live user conversations, prefer Talk mode. Batch audio attachments stay on the media path; browser realtime, native push-to-talk, telephony, and meeting audio should use Talk events and the session-scoped catalogs returned by the Gateway.