Audio Inputs

Send audio as an input_audio part in a chat message: the file as base64, plus its format. Links aren’t accepted for audio.

The samples use the OpenAI SDK set up as in the Quickstart.

import base64
with open("meeting.wav", "rb") as f:
    audio = base64.b64encode(f.read()).decode()
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="<model with audio input>",
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {"type": "text", "text": "Transcribe this and list the action items."},
            {"type": "input_audio", "input_audio": {"data": audio, "format": "wav"}},
        ],
    }],
)
print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Formats

Which formats a model takes depends on its host. Common ones:

wav, mp3, aiff, aac, ogg, flac, m4a, pcm16, pcm24

wav and mp3 work on most models.

What isn’t available

Flow AI takes audio as input only. Audio answers (modalities: ["text", "audio"]), text-to-speech and the speech-to-text endpoint aren’t available, and those parameters are removed from the request.

Tips

• Trim silence and cut long recordings into parts: every second costs input tokens.
• Say what you want back: a verbatim transcript, a summary, speakers, timestamps.
• Mono speech at 16 kHz is enough for most speech tasks and keeps files small.

Billing

The model turns the audio into input tokens by its length, at its input price. A model that doesn’t take audio refuses the request with a 400 before anything is held.