Multimodal — STT, TTS, vision
Language models eat tokens. Multimodal systems add encoders that map audio or images into that shared space (or into tool side-channels).
Speech → text (STT / ASR)
Automatic speech recognition turns waveforms into text (or token lattices). Modern stacks use encoder-decoders or CTC/transducer hybrids; many products wrap cloud STT behind an API.
Spark: listen companions, dry stubs, gated live STT —
VOICE.md. Not production telephony.
Text → speech (TTS)
TTS maps text (or phonemes) to audio. Neural vocoders dominate; latency and voice cloning ethics matter in production.
Spark: speak companions, gated live — same voice doc.
Spark train stays on CPU or a consumer GPU.
Vision
Image encoders (ViT-style patches, CNN towers) project pixels into embeddings the LLM can attend to — “see” as tokens, not magic.
Spark: eyes / vision runtime is a stub — Model aspects. Do not invent live vision.
flowchart LR
mic[Audio] --> stt[STT]
cam[Image] --> vit[Vision encoder]
stt --> llm[LLM / policy]
vit --> llm
llm --> txt[Text]
llm --> tts[TTS]
Cross-links
- Ears → brain → voice SVG lives under
docs/images/(model aspects). - Workflow: /workflow.html
- Hive home: Knowledge
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