Alibaba Unveils ThinkSound: An AI-Powered Audio Generation Model

Alibaba Group has launched ThinkSound, an innovative AI model designed to enhance audio production for video content. Announced on July 16, 2025, by the company's Tongyi Speech Lab, ThinkSound aims to address the persistent challenges faced by both novice and experienced audio professionals in generating high-quality audio that aligns seamlessly with visual content.

Creating audio for videos involves intricate technical and creative hurdles. Producers often struggle with noise management, balancing dialogue and sound effects, and adhering to budgetary and time constraints. The artistic vision must be transformed into a cohesive final product that accurately reflects the visual dynamics and acoustic environments of the video.

According to Crystal Liu, a spokesperson for Alibaba, "ThinkSound utilizes Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to facilitate an interactive, step-by-step approach to audio generation and editing." The model is available in several sizes, including 1.3 billion, 724 million, and 533 million parameters, making it versatile enough to run even on edge devices.

The ThinkSound model operates by first analyzing the visual dynamics of a video, interpreting the corresponding acoustic attributes, and synthesizing contextually appropriate audio. This structured method mimics the workflow of human sound designers, ensuring that the generated audio remains cohesive and contextually accurate throughout the production process. Users can refine the generated audio through intuitive interactions and edit specific segments using natural language instructions, bridging the gap between creative intention and automated production.

Additionally, Alibaba's research team introduced AudioCoT, a large-scale multimodal dataset featuring audio-specific CoT annotations. This dataset enhances the alignment between visual content, textual descriptions, and sound synthesis, thereby improving the overall audio generation process.

In extensive evaluations, ThinkSound demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in video-to-audio generation, surpassing traditional audio quality metrics and CoT-based evaluations. On the MovieGen Audio Bench, a benchmark assessing audio generation capabilities, ThinkSound significantly outperformed existing models, showcasing its potential for applications in film and television sound design, audio post-production, and immersive sound experiences in gaming and virtual reality.

ThinkSound is now available as an open-source model on platforms like Hugging Face, GitHub, and Alibaba’s Model Studio. This development not only marks a significant advancement in audio technology but also positions Alibaba at the forefront of innovation in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence and multimedia production. As companies increasingly integrate AI into creative processes, the implications for the industry could be profound, potentially reshaping how audio and video content is produced and consumed.

In conclusion, the introduction of ThinkSound heralds a new era in audio production, providing users with powerful tools to create high-quality soundscapes that are contextually relevant and artistically satisfying. As the technology continues to evolve, further advancements are anticipated, paving the way for even more sophisticated audio generation capabilities in the near future.