Tools
Media overview
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
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.
Text-to-video, image-to-video, and video-to-video via video_generate.
Async — runs in the background and posts the result when ready.
Generate music or audio tracks via music_generate. Async in chat
sessions on the shared media-generation task lifecycle.
Convert outbound replies to spoken audio via the tts tool plus
messages.tts config. Synchronous.
Summarize inbound images, audio, and video using vision-capable model providers and dedicated media-understanding plugins.
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 | ✓ | ||||||
| Azure Speech | ✓ | ||||||
| BytePlus | ✓ | ||||||
| ComfyUI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| Deepgram | ✓ | ||||||
| DeepInfra | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| ElevenLabs | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| fal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Gradium | ✓ | ||||||
| Inworld | ✓ | ||||||
| LiteLLM | ✓ | ||||||
| Local CLI | ✓ | ||||||
| Microsoft | ✓ | ||||||
| Microsoft Foundry | ✓ | ||||||
| MiniMax | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Mistral | ✓ | ||||||
| OpenAI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| OpenRouter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| PixVerse | ✓ | ||||||
| Qwen | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| Runway | ✓ | ||||||
| SenseAudio | ✓ | ||||||
| Together | ✓ | ||||||
| Volcengine | ✓ | ||||||
| Vydra | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| xAI | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Xiaomi MiMo | ✓ |
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, 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.
Provider mappings (how vendors split across surfaces)
Image, video, music, batch TTS, batch STT, 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 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.
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.
