Share it with your senior IT friends and colleagues
Reading Time: < 1minute
Multimodal AI’s biggest challenge is helping LLMs truly understand speech.
Speech isn’t just words.
It includes emotion, accent, tone, and identity – all mixed together.
Traditional audio tokens try to capture everything.
That makes them heavy, complex, and inefficient for language models.
For example:
Imagine someone says:
“I really need this done today,”
in an urgent tone.
Raw speech contains the words, pitch, pauses, emotion, accent, and background noise.
But for understanding the message, the AI mainly needs:
the words
the urgency
Enters FocalCodec
It compresses speech into very small tokens that keep the meaning and clarity, without unnecessary details.
FocalCodec keeps these essential parts and removes unnecessary details, so the model understands what is being said without processing everything else.
This is what moves AI from listening to actually understanding humans.
