LLM application development

Build voice or vision LLM features

Speech-to-text, TTS, image understanding, document OCR pipelines with multimodal models.

~15 focused hours·intermediate

Tools: Whisper / OpenAI speech-to-text, Text-to-speech (OpenAI/ElevenLabs), Claude/GPT-4o vision, Gemini multimodal, OCR (Tesseract or model-based)

Market relevance — share of job ads asking for this
What employers mean

You should be able to…

  1. Transcribe audio (calls, voice notes) to text using a speech-to-text API
  2. Generate spoken responses (TTS) for a voice assistant
  3. Extract structured info from images (receipts, ID cards, screenshots) using vision models
  4. Build an OCR pipeline for scanned/handwritten documents, including regional-language forms
  5. Combine voice + text + image in a single multi-turn multimodal conversation
  6. Handle non-English/code-mixed audio (Hindi, Hinglish) in transcription pipelines
  7. Optimize multimodal calls for cost — downsample images, chunk long audio

Needs first: Integrate LLM APIs into an application

Learn — free, link-checked

The few resources that matter

Read · beginner · 20 min · docs.anthropic.com

PDF Support

Covers sending PDFs directly to a multimodal model as an alternative to a separate OCR/parsing step. — Anthropic
Read · beginner · 20 min · ai.google.dev

Image Understanding

A third vision API's approach — useful for comparing cost/quality across providers on the same image task. — Google
Read · beginner · 25 min · platform.openai.com

Vision

Shows how to send images to a vision-capable model and parse the response, the core of any document/photo pipeline. — OpenAI
Read · beginner · 25 min · docs.anthropic.com

Vision

Claude's vision docs cover image sizing/cost tradeoffs that matter once you're processing real scanned documents. — Anthropic
Read · beginner · 25 min · platform.openai.com

Speech to Text (Whisper)

Official guide to transcription, the standard first step for any voice-note or call-summarization pipeline. — OpenAI
Build from · intermediate · 90 min · github.com

OpenAI Cookbook

Battle-tested example notebooks (chat apps, vision, retries) you can lift directly into a real project. — OpenAI
Build from · intermediate · 90 min · github.com

Anthropic Cookbook

Official recipes including contextual retrieval and RAG evaluation patterns tuned specifically for Claude. — Anthropic
Practice

Voice-note-to-structured-ticket pipeline for Hindi support calls

Build a pipeline that takes a short Hindi/Hinglish voice note (recorded or generated audio), transcribes it via a speech-to-text API, and uses an LLM to convert it into a structured support ticket (category, urgency, English summary). Add a vision step that extracts info from an attached photo, such as a product or damage photo, into the same ticket.

Done when
  • Pipeline correctly transcribes at least 10 Hindi/Hinglish audio samples with usable, not necessarily perfect, accuracy
  • Transcript is converted into a structured ticket schema (category, urgency, English summary) via the LLM
  • A photo input is processed by a vision model and its extracted details merged into the same ticket
  • End-to-end pipeline runs on a new voice note + photo pair in under 30 seconds and is demoed in a README/video
Prove it

Evidence a recruiter can check

  • Public GitHub repo with sample audio/image inputs (synthetic or self-recorded) and output tickets
  • A demo video showing voice note in, structured ticket out
  • Cost/latency numbers reported (per-minute audio, per-image) in the README
  • Notes on transcription accuracy/failure cases for code-mixed speech
Interview

Questions you'll get asked

  1. How would you build a pipeline that transcribes a customer support call and summarizes it?
  2. What's the difference between using an OCR-specific model vs. a general vision-LLM for document extraction?
  3. How do you handle a scanned document that's rotated, low-resolution, or partially handwritten?
  4. How would you extract structured data from a photo of a physical receipt taken on a phone?
  5. What are the cost/latency tradeoffs of sending high-res images to a vision model, and how do you mitigate them?
  6. How would you build a voice assistant that works well with Hindi-English code-switching?
See where you stand for Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)