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

• Image generation — Create and edit images from text prompts or reference images via image_generate. Async in chat sessions — runs in the background and posts the result when ready.
• Video generation — Text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video via video_generate. Async — runs in the background and posts the result when ready.
• Music generation — Generate music or audio tracks via music_generate. Async in chat sessions on the shared media-generation task lifecycle.
• Text-to-speech — Convert outbound replies to spoken audio via the tts tool plus messages.tts config. Synchronous.
• Media understanding — Summarize inbound images, audio, and video using vision-capable model providers and dedicated media-understanding plugins.
• Speech-to-text — 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	✓	✓	✓
Google	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓	✓
Gradium				✓
Local CLI				✓
Microsoft				✓
Microsoft Foundry	✓
MiniMax	✓	✓	✓	✓
Mistral					✓
OpenAI	✓	✓		✓	✓	✓	✓
OpenRouter	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓		✓
Qwen		✓
Runway		✓
SenseAudio					✓
Together		✓
Vydra	✓	✓		✓
xAI	✓	✓		✓	✓		✓
Xiaomi MiMo	✓			✓			✓

Note

Media understanding uses any vision-capable or audio-capable model registered in your provider config. The matrix above lists providers with dedicated media-understanding support; most multimodal LLM providers (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, etc.) can also understand inbound media when configured as the active reply model.

Async vs synchronous

Capability	Mode	Why
Image	Asynchronous	Provider processing can outlive a chat turn; generated attachments use the shared completion path.
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	Asynchronous	Same provider-processing characteristic as video.

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 through the session's normal visible-reply mode: automatic final reply delivery when configured, or message(action="send") when the session requires the message tool. If the requester session is inactive or its active wake fails, and some generated media is still missing from the completion reply, OpenClaw sends an idempotent direct fallback with only the missing media. Media already delivered by the completion reply is not posted again.

Speech-to-text and Voice Call

Deepgram, DeepInfra, ElevenLabs, Mistral, OpenAI, OpenRouter, 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.

Provider mappings (how vendors split across surfaces)

Google

Image, video, music, batch TTS, backend realtime voice, and
media-understanding surfaces.

OpenAI

Image, video, batch TTS, batch STT, Voice Call streaming STT, backend
realtime voice, and memory-embedding surfaces.

DeepInfra

Chat/model routing, image generation/editing, text-to-video, batch TTS,
batch STT, image media understanding, and memory-embedding surfaces.
DeepInfra-native rerank/classification/object-detection models are not
registered until OpenClaw has dedicated provider contracts for those
categories.

xAI

Image, video, search, code-execution, batch TTS, batch STT, and Voice
Call streaming STT. xAI Realtime voice is an upstream capability but is
not registered in OpenClaw until the shared realtime-voice contract can
represent it.

Related

• Image generation
• Video generation
• Music generation
• Text-to-speech
• Media understanding
• Audio nodes
• Talk mode