OVI Image to Video - AI Model Guide

OVI (ovi-i2v) is a multimodal AI model developed by Character.AI that converts a static input image and a text prompt into a 5-second video with synchronized audio. It uses the Twin Backbone Cross-Modal Fusion architecture and is one of the few open models capable of generating video and audio simultaneously in a single pass.

Yes. OVI generates both video and audio simultaneously in a single generation pass using its Twin Backbone Cross-Modal Fusion architecture. This eliminates the need for separate video and audio pipelines or post-production combining, making it uniquely efficient for audiovisual content creation.

OVI produces 5-second videos at 24 frames per second with a 720×720 pixel output area. It supports multiple aspect ratios including 9:16 (portrait/mobile), 16:9 (landscape/widescreen), and 1:1 (square), making it suitable for various distribution platforms and social media formats.

OVI supports inline speech synthesis using special prompt tags — wrap spoken dialogue with <S> and <E> tags within your text prompt. This enables characters or scenes to speak directly within the generated video without requiring a separate text-to-speech pipeline or audio editing step.

Twin Backbone Cross-Modal Fusion is the underlying architecture of OVI, described in arXiv paper 2510.01284. It enables the model to jointly process and align visual and audio modalities during generation, allowing synchronized video and audio output from a single image and text input in one unified model pass.

OVI (character-ai/ovi-i2v) is available via Replicate and accessible through CRAISEE. You can run it by providing an input image, a text prompt, and optional parameters such as aspect ratio, seed, and negative prompts for both video and audio modalities.

OVI supports independent negative prompts for both video and audio modalities. These allow users to specify unwanted elements or artifacts they want suppressed in the output, giving fine-grained control over generation quality for each modality separately, which is a more advanced control mechanism than most image-to-video models offer.

OVI is purpose-built for creators, animators, storytellers, and developers who need cohesive audiovisual content. It is especially useful for those who want to avoid managing separate video and audio pipelines, making it ideal for social media content, animation prototyping, and interactive storytelling applications.