Multimodal Output Control
Shaping mixed-media responses.
Controlling Mixed-Media Output
Output control is the discipline of shaping what form the response takes when the answer spans text, structured data, and references to generated or selected media. The model will default to prose; production systems need parseable, renderable, composable artifacts.
- You are specifying a render contract, not just asking a question.
- Format reliability beats format richness — predictable shapes win.
Separate Content From Presentation
Have the model emit structured content, and render media on your side. Asking a text model to emit raw image bytes or markup-heavy layouts is fragile; asking it for a typed description that your renderer turns into media is robust.
The model decides what; your pipeline decides how it looks.
block = {
'type': 'figure',
'caption': 'Quarterly revenue',
'chart': {'kind': 'bar', 'x': ['Q1','Q2'], 'y': [10, 14]},
'alt_text': 'Bar chart rising from 10 to 14.'
}All lessons in this course
- Combining Text and Images
- Grounding Across Modalities
- Audio, Text and Vision Together
- Multimodal Output Control