What is…

Multimodal

A model that handles more than text — images, audio, video or files — as input, output, or both.

Early chatbots were text-only. Multimodal models can read a screenshot, a chart, a photo of a whiteboard or a PDF; listen and talk back in real time; and in some cases generate images or video.

Practically, this means you can snap a photo of an error message, a receipt or a broken appliance and just ask.

📌 Example

Uploading a photo of your fridge and asking "what can I make for dinner?"

🧠 Test yourself

Which of these describes Multimodal?

Related terms

LLM (Large Language Model)

A model trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next word — the engine behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok.

Tool use (function calling)

A model's ability to call external tools — search, calculators, code, APIs — and use the results.

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