Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.1 ships five voice models, cuts ASR price 95%
千问大模型 · wechat · 2026-09-23
Alibaba's Qwen team released the Qwen-Audio-3.1 family: five models spanning understanding, generation, interaction, and creation — upgraded ASR, TTS, and Realtime, plus new ASR-Next (audio understanding) and TTS-Next (full audio creation) models. Prices dropped across the board: TTS 70%, Realtime 85%, ASR 95%.
Highlights
- ASR: 30 languages, 16 Chinese dialects (avg CER 10.38% on internal dialect set), native transcript polishing, speaker-labeled structured output, 160ms streaming first-token latency
- ASR-Next: general audio understanding — emotion, environmental and mechanical sounds, audio QA and event localization
- TTS: natural cross-language voice transfer, instruction-controlled emotion and pacing
- TTS-Next: unified generation of speech, sound effects, and ambience with timestamp control and 48kHz output
- Realtime: full-duplex conversation with interruptions, emotion/intent awareness, mid-dialogue tool calling
APIs are live on the Qwen platform and being integrated into agents like Qoder and AI glasses hardware.
Related event: Alibaba Qwen Releases Five Qwen-Audio-3.1 Models with Massive Price Cuts(6 posts)→
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