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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.

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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.

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Provider capability matrix

This table covers the dedicated media-generation, TTS, and STT plugins. Many chat-model providers (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others) also understand inbound media through their reply model; see the full provider list in Media understanding.
ProviderImageVideoMusicTTSSTTRealtime voiceMedia understanding
Alibaba✓
Azure Speech✓
BytePlus✓
ComfyUI✓✓✓
Deepgram✓
DeepInfra✓✓✓✓✓
ElevenLabs✓✓
fal✓✓✓
Google✓✓✓✓✓✓✓
Gradium✓
Inworld✓
LiteLLM✓
Local CLI✓
Microsoft✓
Microsoft Foundry✓
MiniMax✓✓✓✓
Mistral✓
OpenAI✓✓✓✓✓✓
OpenRouter✓✓✓✓✓✓
PixVerse✓
Qwen✓✓
Runway✓
SenseAudio✓
Together✓
Volcengine✓
Vydra✓✓✓
xAI✓✓✓✓✓
Xiaomi MiMo✓
Realtime voice here means provider-native bidirectional realtime (Talk realtime mode, e.g. Gemini Live or the OpenAI Realtime API) — only Google and OpenAI register it today. Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Mistral, OpenAI, and xAI separately register Voice Call streaming STT (one-way audio-to-text); see Speech-to-text and Voice Call below. xAI Realtime voice is an upstream capability but is not registered in OpenClaw until the shared realtime-voice contract can represent it.

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Async vs synchronous

CapabilityModeWhy
ImageAsynchronousProvider processing can outlive a chat turn; generated attachments use the shared completion path.
Text-to-speechSynchronousProvider responses return in seconds; attached to the reply audio.
VideoAsynchronousProvider processing takes 30 s to several minutes; slow queues can run up to the configured timeout.
MusicAsynchronousSame 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.

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Speech-to-text and Voice Call

Deepgram, DeepInfra, ElevenLabs, Google, Groq, 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.

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Provider mappings (how vendors split across surfaces)

Image, video, music, batch TTS, batch STT, backend realtime voice, and media-understanding surfaces.
Image, video, batch TTS, batch STT, Voice Call streaming STT, backend realtime voice, and memory-embedding surfaces.
Chat/model routing, image generation/editing, text-to-video, batch TTS, batch STT, image media understanding, and memory-embedding surfaces. DeepInfra also exposes reranking, classification, object-detection, and other native model types; OpenClaw has no provider contract for those categories yet, so this plugin does not register them.
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.