{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-01-22-qwen3-tts-asr-open-weights/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-01-22-qwen3-tts-asr-open-weights/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2026-01-22-qwen3-tts-asr-open-weights","date":"2026-01-22","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Alibaba open-sources Qwen3-TTS and, a week later, Qwen3-ASR","deck":null,"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).","category":"open-source","category_label":"Open source","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"GitHub - QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS","url":"https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS","type":"code","group":"primary","domain":"github.com"},{"n":2,"title":"arXiv 2601.15621 - Qwen3-TTS technical report","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15621","type":"paper","group":"primary","domain":"arxiv.org"},{"n":3,"title":"Hugging Face - Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoice","url":"https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-CustomVoice","type":"code","group":"primary","domain":"huggingface.co"},{"n":4,"title":"GitHub - QwenLM/Qwen3-ASR","url":"https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-ASR","type":"code","group":"primary","domain":"github.com"},{"n":5,"title":"Hugging Face - Qwen3-ASR-1.7B","url":"https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-ASR-1.7B","type":"code","group":"primary","domain":"huggingface.co"}],"official":5,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Alibaba","Qwen"],"title":"Alibaba open-sources Qwen3-TTS (voice design, 3-second cloning, 97 ms streaming) and, a week later, Qwen3-ASR","summary":"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). It offers voice design from text descriptions, voice cloning from about 3 s of audio in 10 languages, and ~97 ms streaming latency. On 2026-01-29 Qwen3-ASR followed (0.6B/1.7B plus a forced aligner, 30 languages and 22 Chinese dialects). Both became among the most-downloaded open speech models of 2026.","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)"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["voice","speech","tts","asr","open-weights","apache-2.0"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nQwen released a complete open TTS family with voice design, cloning and low-latency streaming, then an open ASR family\nwith a forced aligner for timestamps a week later, both under Apache-2.0.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nVoice cloning and voice design had mostly been proprietary (ElevenLabs and others). Qwen3-TTS made them freely\nself-hostable, and it became one of the most-downloaded speech models of 2026.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-09-23-qwen-audio-3-1","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-23-qwen-audio-3-1/","date":"2026-09-23","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Alibaba launches Qwen-Audio-3.1 five-model voice stack and cuts audio API prices up to 95%","deck":null,"takeaway":"Chinese labs (Alibaba, StepFun, ByteDance) now field voice-agent models that top or approach GPT-Live / Gemini Live on public leaderboards at a fraction of the price, turning real-time voice into a price war.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":10,"official":8,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-30","orgs":["Alibaba","Qwen"]},{"id":"2026-07-20-qwen-audio-3-0-tts","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-07-20-qwen-audio-3-0-tts/","date":"2026-07-20","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Alibaba's Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS takes #1 on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard","deck":null,"takeaway":"A Chinese lab led the main independent TTS leaderboard at a fraction of ElevenLabs' price, which started the summer-2026 TTS price and quality race.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":4,"official":3,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["Alibaba","Qwen"]},{"id":"2026-03-09-fish-audio-s2-open-source","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-03-09-fish-audio-s2-open-source/","date":"2026-03-09","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Fish Audio open-sources S2","deck":"Expressive 80+ language TTS with inline emotion tags","takeaway":"It made open TTS with fine-grained, LLM-style prompt control and production streaming available to the public, and set the open-weights bar for most of 2026.","category":"open-source","category_label":"Open source","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":4,"official":4,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-10-13","orgs":["Fish Audio"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[{"id":"qwen3-asr","name":"Qwen3-ASR (0.6B / 1.7B) + Qwen3-ForcedAligner","url":"https://postcutoff.com/m/qwen3-asr/"},{"id":"qwen3-tts","name":"Qwen3-TTS (open weights 0.6B / 1.7B; API qwen3-tts-flash)","url":"https://postcutoff.com/m/qwen3-tts/"}],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":null}