I was wearing a t-shirt with a partial Reka logo at the edge of the frame. I never said the word "Reka" in that segment. The model caught the logo, connected it to the topic I was discussing, and mentioned it unprompted in the output it generated.
That is not a transcript trick. The model was watching.
At the AI Agents Conference 2026, I gave a talk called "Apps That See" — six live demos showing how to build applications that understand images and video. Every project is open source and ready to clone. This post walks through each one so you have enough context to pick it up, run it, and adapt it to something useful in your own work.
Vision AI Is Accessible Now
Not long ago, working with visual AI meant GPU clusters, specialized teams, and weeks of training. Today a compressed 4B model like Qwen or Gemini 3 runs on a regular laptop and handles image description well enough to prototype. Step up to a 7B model like Reka Edge and the quality improves meaningfully. It also runs locally: a gaming PC with a decent GPU is enough. No server required.
For tasks that need more power, cloud APIs give you faster results without local hardware requirements. The tradeoff is that your images and video go to a third-party provider. For corridor cameras or stock photos that is usually acceptable. For private or sensitive content, local is the better default.
The practical pattern: start local to build and test, then decide whether the task actually requires cloud.
What You Can Build With This
- Accessibility: Describe a scene in real time for visually impaired users, or identify objects on demand.
- Content creation: Extract structure from a video and turn it into a blog post, caption set, or highlight reel.
- Productivity: Search through thousands of videos for a specific object or topic, even when the title gives no indication of the content.
- Automation: Trigger actions only when specific visual conditions are met, such as an unrecognized person entering a room.
- Fun: Most developers' first contact with AI is building something for themselves, and that is a perfectly valid starting point.
Demo 1: Caption This — Generate a Prompt from Any Image
Source: fboucher/caption-this
If you work with image generation models, you end up with a lot of images to test and compare. Writing the text prompt that would reproduce a specific image is tedious. This tool does it for you: give it an image, get back a prompt you can use to regenerate something similar.
The demo uses an HTTP client extension in VS Code to call the API directly, no SDK. Pass an image, ask for a plain-text prompt that would recreate it. One prompt detail that improved results noticeably: add no markdown to the instruction.
POST https://api.reka.ai/v1/chat
Content-Type: application/json
{
"model": "reka-flash",
"messages": [{
"role": "user",
"content": [
{ "type": "image_url", "image_url": { "url": "https://..." } },
{ "type": "text", "text": "Write a prompt in plain text, no markdown, that would generate the exact same image." }
]
}]
}
One thing to know when testing this across different models: some accept an image URL directly, others require the image as a base64-encoded string. Same task, same prompt, different input contract. If you plan to swap models in your app, account for this difference from the start.
Demo 2: Media Library — Compare Vision Models Side by Side
Source: fboucher/media-library
This is a web app that connects to multiple vision backends and lets you switch between them at runtime. The motivation: benchmark Reka Edge running locally — via OpenRouter or directly through the Reka API — against other models on real tasks.
Object detection surfaces the biggest portability problem. Some models return bounding boxes in an HTML-style bracket format with pixel coordinates. Others use a 2D box structure with a different coordinate scheme. If you code against one format and then swap models, your rendering breaks. There is no standard here — handle the differences at the application layer, not the model layer.
The app uses the OpenAI API format as the common interface across all backends. Any model with a compatible endpoint can be swapped in with minimal changes. It does not eliminate the per-model quirks, but it reduces the friction of switching to a configuration change rather than a rewrite.
Video input is supported too, though far fewer models handle it than images. Of the models tested, Reka Edge is the standout for video — the others either reject it or behave inconsistently.
Demo 3: Video2Blog — Turn a Video into a Structured Post
Source: fboucher/video2blog
I built this for myself. I do a lot of tutorial videos and I wanted a tool that would turn a recording into a structured blog post without me having to write one from scratch.
The tool sends the video to a vision model with a detailed prompt: target structure, tone, format, and an instruction to flag moments where a screenshot would add value. The model returns timestamps — it cannot extract frames itself, but it tells you exactly where to look, and you pull them locally with ffmpeg.
That creates one architectural quirk worth knowing: the video lives in two places. ffmpeg needs it locally to extract frames. The hosted model needs it uploaded to analyze content. For a one-evening project it works well enough, and I use it often enough that it has paid for itself many times over.
After the first draft, you stay in a conversation loop: change the tone, translate to French, swap a timestamp, restructure a section. The model holds context and iterates with you until the result is what you want.
Demo 4: Video Analyzer — Search and Query Your Video Library
Source: reka-ai/api-examples-dotnet
Most video search runs on titles, descriptions, and transcribed audio. This demo searches by what is actually visible on screen.
The app pre-indexes a video library by sending each video through a vision model ahead of time. When a query arrives, the heavy work is already done. A search for "robot arm" returns the right video — a clip of a robotic arm animation. It also returns a false positive: fast-moving hands apparently looked close enough to fool the model. Useful, not perfect, and worth designing around in your UX.
The Q&A feature goes further. You pick a video and ask a specific question. "What database was used?" returned MySQL — and noted it was running in a Docker container. The model identified that from watching the screen, not from audio. No transcript needed.
From there, you can generate study materials from any recorded session. The demo produces a multiple-choice quiz with answer options, correct answers, and explanations. The model is doing comprehension, not transcription.
Demo 5: Roast My Life — What the Model Actually Sees
Source: reka-ai/api-examples-python
I never mentioned the pictures on my wall. The model did.
In a video about Python and AI, the model's generated blog post made a remark about the artwork hanging behind me. I had said nothing about it. The model noticed, mentioned it, and moved on as if it were obvious.
Then there was the t-shirt moment described at the top of this post. A partial logo, half out of frame, no mention of it anywhere in the audio — and the model connected it to the topic anyway.
This demo is named Roast My Life because the model ends up commenting on things you never intended to share. But the real point is what it reveals: a vision model is not a smarter transcript. It is watching. The larger models do this particularly well, and once you see it, it changes how you think about what these tools can do — and what they will pick up without you asking.
Demo 6: N8N Automation — No-Code Video Clipping Pipeline
Sources: N8N Reka Vision integration
Vision AI does not always need custom code. This demo wires everything together in N8N, a visual workflow tool, with no programming required.
The trigger is a new video published to YouTube. The workflow finds an engaging clip, reformats it from horizontal to vertical, adds captions in a specific style (all lowercase, specific colors — chosen to be obviously distinct from any default), and sends an email with the finished clip attached. The whole thing runs automatically.
For developers, this pattern is worth knowing even if you code everything else. Many real business workflows have a vision AI step that fits cleanly into a larger automation, and a no-code tool is often the fastest way to ship it.
Watch the Full Talk
The demos above are the written version. The live version, with the actual code running, models responding in real time, and a few things going sideways in interesting ways, is on YouTube.
All the Code
The demos span Python, C#, raw HTTP, Go, and N8N. Vision AI is not tied to a specific stack — if your environment can make an HTTP request, it can call a vision model.
All projects:
- Caption This
- Media Library
- Video2Blog
- Video Analyzer
- Roast My Life
- Reka Clip API Examples
- N8N Nodes for Reka
- N8N Reka Vision Integration
