Open models that listen, understand, and reason about all sound

Audio General Intelligence — the capacity of AI agents to deeply understand and reason about all types of auditory input, including speech, environmental sounds, and music — is crucial for enabling AI to interact seamlessly and naturally with our world.

Despite this importance, audio intelligence has traditionally lagged behind advancements in vision and language processing. This gap arises from significant challenges: limited datasets, the complexity of audio signals, and a shortage of advanced neural architectures and effective training methodologies tailored specifically for audio. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models have begun to transform the landscape — offering promising pathways to enhance foundational audio tasks like ASR, cross-modal retrieval, and audio captioning, while giving emergence to new tasks like complex Audio Question Answering.