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Video Q&A lets you ask about the actions, sequence, and outcome of an episode. Start with a concrete question, and ask the model to separate visible evidence from any inferred intent. For example, an assembly video may show several actions toward a goal without showing whether the final assembly succeeds.

Identify a goal and its subgoals

The following request asks about a robot-assembly episode. It requests a concise account of the overall goal, the observed subgoals in order, and whether the ending supports a completion claim. Install the perceptron>=0.4.0 Python package and set PERCEPTRON_API_KEY before running:
The answer is natural language. reasoning_effort controls reasoning for the request; it does not require you to display a reasoning trace in your application. If you need fixed fields for downstream processing, define a JSON Schema for fields such as goal, subgoals, and outcome.

Ask a follow-up grounded in time

A follow-up question can use the first answer while keeping the original video in the supplied history. Run this after the example above to ask for evidence near the end of the episode:
The video remains asset 0: the assistant answer and follow-up add text but no new media. The service receives the full messages list on each request; it does not retain this history automatically.

Combine audible and visible evidence

The robot-assembly sample above has no audio track. For a question that depends on sound, supply a video with audio and set vision_config.enable_audio_in_video to true on each request that needs it. This example uses a basketball clip with a soundtrack; run it after creating client above:
Soundtrack analysis is off by default. A video without an audio stream is still processed visually; an audio decode error is not evidence of silence. For standalone recordings, use the audio inputs. See video soundtracks for supported video inputs and limits.

Choose the question and evidence

  • Ask for observable actions when labeling a task sequence. Use separate language for inferred goals and observed completion.
  • Narrow the question or supply a relevant excerpt when a long video contains many unrelated activities. Sampled frames can miss brief actions.
  • Use video clipping for temporal evidence, or video tracking when the answer needs an object’s changing position.
  • Use Multilook for independent questions over the same video. Keep dependent follow-ups in a conversation so they include the earlier answer.
See video understanding for supported video inputs and timestamped frames.