Most production AI systems in 2026 handle more than text. If you’ve only built text-in-text-out, this module fills the gap.
Send an image to the model alongside a text prompt. GPT-4o, Claude, and Gemini all accept images natively. Use cases: document extraction (receipts, forms, diagrams), visual QA, image classification without training a custom model. Start by sending a screenshot and asking the model to describe it — then try structured extraction.
DALL-E 3 (via API), Stable Diffusion (open-source, run locally), and Midjourney (no API). For programmatic use: DALL-E API or Stability AI’s API. Understand that generation is a separate model from understanding — the same system prompt patterns don’t apply.
OpenAI Whisper (API or local) is the standard for transcription. Handle long audio by chunking into segments. Text-to-speech: OpenAI TTS API, ElevenLabs, or open-source Bark/Coqui.
!!! warning “Voice cloning” Voice cloning raises ethical and legal questions — know the boundaries.
Extract frames, send as image sequence with timestamps. Gemini handles long video natively. For others, sample keyframes and process as images. Video is expensive in tokens — be selective about what you send.
Embed images alongside text using multimodal embedding models (Cohere Multimodal, Jina CLIP). Store in the same vector DB. Retrieve across modalities — a text query can surface relevant images, and vice versa.
OpenAI Vision · OpenAI Whisper · OpenAI TTS · DALL-E API · Gemini multimodal · Stable Diffusion · Hugging Face multimodal models