Model catalog

Every model picker in Tale — the chat's model menu, an agent's model binding, the defaults the crawler and RAG services use — draws from one catalog: the models declared on your organisation's AI providers. A fresh instance ships with a single provider, OpenRouter, whose one key covers chat, vision, embeddings, transcription, text-to-speech, and image generation. This page is the reference for where that catalog lives in the UI, what the tags on each model mean, and what ships out of the box.

Where the catalog lives

Open Settings > AI providers and click a provider row. The drawer lists everything the provider declares: its base URL and API key, its Default Models, and the Models list itself — searchable, with Show more past the first ten. Add model declares a new entry by hand; Fetch models pulls the list the provider's API reports. Models an admin marks as Hidden from model pickers stay resolvable for existing bindings but stop appearing in menus — that is how superseded versions retire without breaking old agents.

Each model carries one or more capability tags: Chat, Vision, Embedding, Transcription, Text-to-speech, Image generation, Image edit. The tags are load-bearing — they decide which pickers a model shows up in and which platform capability is allowed to call it. A model with no matching tag never appears where that capability is needed.

The shipped defaults

The Default Models card names which model each background capability uses when nothing more specific is bound:

Text-to-speech for voice mode ships on OpenAI's GPT-4o mini TTS through the same OpenRouter key, and image generation defaults to FLUX.2 [pro].

How the list stays fresh

Models drift faster than docs. Two mechanisms on the AI providers page keep the catalog current: the Model catalog card refreshes model capabilities — pricing, context window, reasoning, vision — from OpenRouter's public catalog daily, and the Weekly auto-sync of provider config toggle merges newly released flagship versions into the org's provider config once a week, hiding superseded ones and leaving any field you customised untouched.

The shipped list below is regenerated from the same source, so it matches what a fresh instance sees:

The full and live catalogue lives at openrouter.ai/models; any model OpenRouter exposes can be added to your instance from the same drawer.

Where this fits

Models are the layer beneath every agent, every chat reply, every voice output, and every image the platform renders. OpenRouter is the default, not a requirement — adding a direct vendor, a local Ollama or vLLM server, or a second gateway is admin work covered in Providers, and the file-based form of the same configuration lives under Configuration → providers. For picking between chat models when more than one could do the job, Arena Mode is the workflow built for exactly that question.