Alibaba's ThinkSound Revolutionizes AI Audio Generation

Alibaba's Speech AI team has made a significant leap in artificial intelligence with the open-source release of ThinkSound, the world's first audio generation model supporting chain-of-thought reasoning. This breakthrough technology transforms how AI systems generate synchronized audio from visual inputs.

From Basic Dubbing to Structured Understanding

Traditional video-to-audio systems often struggle with maintaining spatiotemporal correlation between visual events and their corresponding sounds. ThinkSound addresses this limitation through its innovative three-stage reasoning process:

1. Scene Analysis: The system first examines overall motion and scene semantics
2. Sound Source Focus: It then identifies specific object sound source areas
3. Interactive Editing: Finally, it allows real-time adjustments via natural language commands

Advanced Training with AudioCoT Dataset

The research team developed the comprehensive AudioCoT multimodal dataset to train ThinkSound, featuring:

• 2,531.8 hours of high-quality audio samples
• Integrated content from VGGSound and AudioSet
• Multi-stage quality verification processes
• Specialized object-level and instruction-level samples

This robust training enables the model to handle complex instructions like "extract owl calls while avoiding wind interference."

Superior Performance Metrics

Experimental results demonstrate ThinkSound's advantages:

• 15% improvement over mainstream methods on VGGSound test set
• Outperforms Meta's comparable models on MovieGen Audio Bench test set The model's code and pre-trained weights are now freely available on:
• GitHub: https://github.com/FunAudioLLM/ThinkSound
• HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/spaces/FunAudioLLM/ThinkSound
• ModelScope: https://www.modelscope.cn/studios/iic/ThinkSound

Future Applications and Industry Impact

The Alibaba team plans to expand ThinkSound's capabilities for:

• Complex acoustic environment understanding
• Game development and virtual reality applications Industry experts predict this technology will:
• Transform film/TV sound effects production
• Redefine human-computer interaction boundaries
• Accelerate innovation in the creator economy

Key Points:

1. First audio generation model with chain-of-thought reasoning
2. Three-stage process ensures precise sound-visual synchronization
3. Trained on specialized 2,500+ hour AudioCoT dataset
4. Outperforms competitors by significant margins
5. Open-source availability promotes widespread adoption