What Is a Native Audio Model? How Speech-to-Speech AI Skips the Transcription Step
Native audio models process or generate acoustic representations directly, preserving information such as timing, intonation, and speaker cues that text transcription would discard. They are fundamentally different from the "transcribe to text first, then synthesize speech" pipeline: the latter changes the causal chain, and the evidence of success, the sources of cost, and the approach to risk control all differ. The article breaks down its workflow into five stages: converting waveforms into audio tokens, modeling speech and non-speech context, inferring semantics and dialogue state, generating audio tokens, and decoding natural speech.
Native audio models process or generate acoustic representations directly, preserving information such as timing, intonation, and speaker cues that text transcription would discard. They are fundamentally different from the "transcribe to text first, then synthesize speech" pipeline: the latter changes the causal chain, and the evidence of success, the sources of cost, and the approach to risk control all differ. The article breaks down its workflow into five stages: converting waveforms into au
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