Alibaba Cloud announced today the launch of the release of a new artificial intelligence model in its Qwen family uniquely capable of comprehending text, audio and video while also responding in real-time voice conversations.

The company said the model, which is named Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, is small enough that it will fit on devices such as mobile phones and similar devices.

Despite its compact size, at only 7 billion parameters, Alibaba Cloud said it provides high performance and powerful multimodal capabilities. It is capable of understanding video inputs from cameras and watching the screen as the user operates the device to respond in real time. This means that it can be combined with applications to hold conversations.

“This unique combination makes it the perfect foundation for developing agile, cost-effective AI agents that deliver tangible value, especially intelligent voice applications,” the company said in the announcement.

Users could use the model to provide real-time assistance while shopping, step-by-step cooking guidance by analyzing video ingredients, or even read through a PDF on the screen to assist with tedious research. The video capabilities of the model could also make it ideal for visually impaired users to navigate environments because it can read signs, understand context clues and match voices to faces.

The company released the model open-source on Hugging Face and GitHub. It is additionally accessible on Qwen Chat and through the company’s open-source community ModelScope. Open source refers to a type of software development where the code and weights of the AI models are freely available for developers to use, modify and distribute. This community-centric model promotes collaboration and Alibaba Cloud has released over 200 generative AI models open source to date.

Since the open-source release of DeepSeek-R1, from the China-based AI developer of the same name, Chinese companies have been making headway in the AI market with significant model releases. DeepSeek’s R1 model family introduced reasoning capabilities where models could “think” through problems, and last month Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. released Hunyuan Turbo S, which the company claimed outperformed R1.

Last week, Chinese multinational internet search giant Baidu released a multimodal foundational model and its first reasoning-focused model Ernie-X1 to compete with DeepSeek.

Alibaba also updated its largest Qwen 2.5-Max AI model in late January, claiming it beat out DeepSeek-V3, the company’s latest non-reasoning model.

Image: Alibaba Cloud