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Vision & audio APIs

Understand images, audio, and video through model APIs, including OCR, object localization, and speech transcription.

Token estimates

Skill instructions
About 1,878 tokens
Tool definitions
About 5,830 tokens

Estimated text size—not usage or cost.

SKILL.md
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Media Understanding

Use qwen-mm-plugins-api to understand media through configured model services. The tools are grouped by model family:

  • VL model (Qwen-VL, OpenAI-compatible endpoint): vision_chat, ocr, grounding.
  • Omni model (Qwen-Omni — the AV tools combine video frames and audio; the ASR/music tools focus on audio): omni_asr, omni_asr_timestamped, omni_multi_speaker_asr, omni_av_caption, omni_av_grounding, omni_av_counting, omni_music_caption.
  • Other services: transcribe_audio (Qwen3-ASR), segmentation (a SAM3 server).

Check the qwen-mm-plugins-api tools in your tool list for full schemas and parameters. For file reading, rendering, or metadata inspection, use core.

When to Use Which Tool

VL model (single images/videos, spatial reasoning):

  • Ask a VLM about images/videos (caption, VQA, free-form) → vision_chat
  • Extract text from an image → ocr
  • Detect/locate objects in an image (bounding boxes, spatial WHERE) → grounding. It sends EXIF-corrected pixels, so returned 0–1000 boxes address the displayed image and can be passed directly to core crop/draw_bbox or search image_search.

Omni model (audio + video together, temporal reasoning; clips up to a few minutes):

  • Transcribe speech, plain textomni_asr (one continuous string, no timestamps)
  • Transcribe with timestampsomni_asr_timestamped (granularity = sentence or word; also returns SRT)
  • Who said whatomni_multi_speaker_asr (diarization: speaker labels + timestamps + SRT; pass num_speakers if known)
  • Describe the content over timeomni_av_caption (timestamped Markdown descriptions of visual content, dialogue, music, and sounds)
  • Find WHEN something happensomni_av_grounding (natural-language query → matching time segments; temporal localization)
  • Count how many times an event/object/action occurs → omni_av_counting (target → total + per-occurrence timestamps)
  • Analyze / caption a music trackomni_music_caption (whole-track tags — genre / moods / instruments / key / time signature / vocal profile — plus a dense English caption for music generation; audio-only, no timestamps)

Other services:

  • Segment objects in an image (masks) → segmentation
  • Transcribe speech from audio/video, fast and long-file friendly → transcribe_audio

Tips

Vision chat: pass images/videos + text prompt. Model precedence is explicit modelQWEN_MM_API_VL_MODELqwen3.7-plus. Use dry_run=true to inspect payloads.

VL/Omni endpoints: default to DashScope (DASHSCOPE_BASE_URL and DASHSCOPE_API_KEY). Use the existing base_url, api_key, and model arguments for another compatible endpoint, including a self-hosted service. The endpoint must support the selected tool's media payload and model.

OrcaRouter: configure ORCAROUTER_API_KEY, then pass base_url="https://api.orcarouter.ai/v1" and a gateway model ID. The server selects that key automatically; an explicit api_key overrides it.

OpenRouter: configure OPENROUTER_API_KEY, then pass base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1" and an OpenRouter model ID, such as qwen/qwen3.7-plus for images. The server selects that key automatically; an explicit api_key overrides it. For video, use videos with a suitable model such as qwen/qwen3.8-max-0902. Local sampled frames are sent as ordered images; direct video URLs require video support from the model and provider.

Grounding: returns normalized boxes (0–1000). Set return_img=true to get the annotated image back, or draw them yourself with core's draw_bbox.

ASR (transcribe_audio): accepts audio or video, auto-chunks long files. Formats: srt (default), text, json. Uses DashScope with DASHSCOPE_API_KEY; configured ASR_SERVER_URLS provide a self-hosted fallback when the key is absent or DashScope fails. Needs ffmpeg for audio extraction and chunking.

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