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Phi-3.5 Vision on live video streams

Phi-3.5 Vision · Microsoft · Small VLM · Open-weight

Phi-3.5 Vision is Microsoft’s small multimodal model, released August 2024 at 4.2B parameters and built for multi-frame image understanding in a compact footprint. Phi-3.5 Vision is not currently in Overshoot's live model catalog. When a compact multi-frame model like this is available through the API, a live camera or screen-share stream can be queried through the same low-latency, OpenAI-compatible chat-completions interface used for still images.

Phi-3.5 Vision is not currently in the live Overshoot model catalog (verified against the live model catalog on 2026-07-14). Availability changes over time - query GET /v1beta/models for the current list.

Developer
Microsoft
Parameters
4.2B
Context window
128K tokens
License
MIT
Released
Aug 2024
Inputs
Text, images, video frames
Overshoot availability
Not in live catalogas of 2026-07-14

What Phi-3.5 Vision is good at

Phi-3.5 Vision was designed from the start to reason across several images at once, not just a single frame, which makes it well suited to comparing frames sampled at different points in a video or tracking how a scene changes over a short window.

Its small 4.2B footprint keeps inference cheap and fast without giving up general visual competence, so it remains a practical option for products that need to query video often, run on constrained infrastructure, or keep serving costs low at scale.

  • Multi-frame comparison and change tracking across a video sequence
  • Cost-sensitive deployments that query video frequently
  • General visual question answering in a compact model footprint

Phi-3.5 Vision and live video streaming

Phi-3.5 Vision is not currently in Overshoot's live model catalog, and GET /v1beta/models is the authoritative list at any moment. The workflow it would slot into is uniform across the API: publish video over WebRTC through LiveKit to open a Stream, then send a chat-completions request with an ovs:// reference to the frames you need: the latest frame, an exact timestamp, or a recent segment sampled at up to 1 fps from the 600 seconds of retained history.

Phi-3.5 Vision's multi-frame training makes it the kind of model that fits requests referencing more than one point in a stream at once, so it would pair well with segment-based ovs:// references and SSE streaming if it enters the catalog.

How it compares to Phi-4 Multimodal

Phi-3.5 Vision is the predecessor to Phi-4 Multimodal, which is larger at 5.6B parameters, adds speech as a modality, and improves document and math performance. Phi-3.5 Vision remains a lighter-weight option when a task is purely visual and the smaller model’s multi-frame strengths are enough.

Frequently asked questions

Can Phi-3.5 Vision analyze live video?

Phi-3.5 Vision was built for multi-frame image understanding, so it can analyze video by reading sampled frames when self-hosted or served by another provider. It is not currently in Overshoot's live model catalog, so it cannot be pointed at an Overshoot WebRTC stream today. Check GET /v1beta/models for the current catalog.

Is Phi-3.5 Vision open source?

Yes. It ships under the MIT license, which permits unrestricted commercial use, modification, and self-hosting of the weights.

Is Phi-3.5 Vision available on Overshoot?

Not currently. Phi-3.5 Vision is not in Overshoot's live model catalog. The catalog changes over time, so check GET /v1beta/models for the up-to-date list before building against a specific model.

What is Phi-3.5 Vision best used for?

It is built for multi-frame image understanding in a small footprint, which makes it a good fit for comparing several sampled frames from a video or running frequent, low-cost visual queries against a stream of footage.

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