Alibaba open-sources Qwen3-TTS and, a week later, Qwen3-ASR
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 2026-01-22 Alibaba’s Qwen team released Qwen3-TTS under Apache-2.0 (0.6B and 1.7B checkpoints plus a 12 Hz tokenizer).
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Qwen3-TTS repos: Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-{1.7B,0.6B}-{Base,CustomVoice}, 1.7B-VoiceDesign, Qwen3-TTS-Tokenizer-12Hz; tech report arXiv 2601.15621
- Languages (TTS): zh, en, ja, ko, de, fr, ru, pt, es, it; end-to-end latency as low as 97 ms; one model for streaming and non-streaming
- Qwen3-ASR (2026-01-29): 1.7B and 0.6B plus Qwen3-ForcedAligner-0.6B; 30 languages + 22 Chinese dialects, singing/music robust; self-reported AISHELL-2 WER 2.71 vs 5.06 for Whisper-large-v3
- Hugging Face downloads in the month to 2026-09-29: Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoice ~2.4M, Qwen3-ASR-1.7B ~1.76M
- Hosted equivalents: qwen3-tts-flash / qwen3-tts-instruct-flash on Model Studio; superseded in Alibaba’s API lineup by Qwen-Audio-3.0 (Jul 2026) and 3.1 (Sep 2026)
What happened
Qwen released a complete open TTS family with voice design, cloning and low-latency streaming, then an open ASR family with a forced aligner for timestamps a week later, both under Apache-2.0.
Why it matters
Voice cloning and voice design had mostly been proprietary (ElevenLabs and others). Qwen3-TTS made them freely self-hostable, and it became one of the most-downloaded speech models of 2026.
Sources
5 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 5 primary
Primary
- GitHub - QwenLM/Qwen3-TTSgithub.com, code
- arXiv 2601.15621 - Qwen3-TTS technical reportarxiv.org, paper
- Hugging Face - Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoicehuggingface.co, code
- GitHub - QwenLM/Qwen3-ASRgithub.com, code
- Hugging Face - Qwen3-ASR-1.7Bhuggingface.co, code
Changes
- Filed