What is the Multimodal Live API?
The Multimodal Live API is a low-latency, bidirectional AI interface launched by Google. It supports text, audio, and video input, and outputs in audio and text forms, helping developers build applications with real-time audio and video streaming capabilities. The Multimodal Live API makes conversations with AI more natural and allows users to interrupt the AI at any time, just like conversations between humans. The Multimodal Live API has video understanding capabilities, allowing users to interact with AI through camera input or screen sharing. The API is designed for server-to-server communication and is suitable for application scenarios requiring real-time, multimodal interaction.
Main features of the Multimodal Live API
- Multimodal interaction: Combines text, audio, and video input to provide a richer interactive experience.
- Low-latency real-time interaction: Supports fast responses, making conversations smoother and more natural.
- Session memory: Maintains contextual memory within a single session and can recall previous interaction content.
- Function calling and code execution: Supports integration with external services and data sources to enable function calling and code execution.
- Interruption and resumption: Users can interrupt the AI's output at any time and resume at an appropriate time.
- Multiple voice support: Provides multiple preset voice options to suit different application scenarios.
Technical principles of the Multimodal Live API
- Multimodal data processing: Can process data input from different modalities (text, audio, video) and has advanced data processing and parsing capabilities.
- Real-time bidirectional communication: Implements real-time bidirectional communication between server and client based on the WebSocket protocol.
- Natural language processing (NLP): Based on complex NLP technologies, such as language models, semantic understanding, and dialogue management.
- Speech recognition and synthesis: To process audio input and output, the API integrates speech recognition (converting speech to text) and speech synthesis (converting text to speech) technologies.
Project address of the Multimodal Live API
- Project official website：ai.google.dev/api/multimodal-live
- GitHub repository：https://github.com/google-gemini/multimodal-live-api
Application scenarios of the Multimodal Live API
- Customer service and support: Provides 24*7 virtual customer service, interacting with customers based on voice and video to answer questions.
- Online education: As a virtual teacher, provides real-time interactive teaching, including language learning, programming instruction, and more.
- Remote medical consultation: Doctors can conduct remote diagnosis and health consultation based on video calls.
- Video conferencing and collaboration: Enhances the video conferencing experience with real-time speech recognition and translation, improving the efficiency of cross-national communication.
- Entertainment and gaming: Provides virtual character interaction in games, or more natural interactive experiences in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).