How do audio and speech LLMs work, and how do discrete audio tokens differ from text tokens?
Speech LLMs either transcribe to text or model audio straight away as discrete tokens. The signal is the semantic-vs-acoustic token split and why end-to-end audio models outperform ASR-plus-LLM pipelines on latency and prosody.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Speech LLMs either transcribe to text or model audio straight away as discrete tokens. The signal is the semantic-vs-acoustic token split and why end-to-end audio models outperform ASR-plus-LLM pipelines on latency and prosody.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
