Step-Audio 2
Multi-modal large language model designed for audio understanding
Step-Audio2 is an advanced, end-to-end multimodal large language model designed for high-fidelity audio understanding and natural speech conversation: unlike many pipelines that separate speech recognition, processing, and synthesis, Step-Audio2 processes raw audio, reasons about semantic and paralinguistic content (like emotion, speaker characteristics, non-verbal cues), and can generate contextually appropriate responses — including potentially generating or transforming audio output. It integrates a latent-space audio encoder, discrete acoustic tokens, and reinforcement-learning–based training (CoT + RL) to enhance its ability to capture and reproduce voice styles, intonations, and subtle vocal cues. Moreover, Step-Audio2 supports tool-calling and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), allowing it to access external knowledge sources or audio/text databases, thus reducing hallucinations and improving coherence in complex dialogues.