Qwen2-Audio-7B

Qwen2-Audio-7B is Alibaba's large audio-language model, released July 15, 2024 under Apache 2.0. It accepts raw audio input and offers two interaction modes in one checkpoint: voice chat, where users converse by voice with no typed text at all, and audio analysis, where audio plus text instructions produce analysis covering speech recognition, audio captioning, and audio question answering across 8+ languages and dialects.

The honest picture: it handles short-to-medium audio clips well (around 30 seconds is the practical sweet spot) but is not a full meeting-transcription engine, and like all audio models of its generation it can struggle with heavy accents, overlapping speakers, and noisy environments. The instruct variant is the one to use; the base pretrained checkpoint is mainly for researchers. It became one of the most practical open options for local voice-agent prototyping before the Qwen2.5-Omni and Qwen3-Omni generations arrived.