Alibaba’s Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS takes #1 on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 2026-07-20 Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab released Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS in Flash (real-time) and Plus (quality) tiers.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra81 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.520 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen111 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.750 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 20 days before it.
Key facts
- API ids: qwen-audio-3.0-tts-flash, qwen-audio-3.0-tts-plus (Alibaba Cloud Model Studio)
- Artificial Analysis TTS arena: Plus #1 at Elo ~1,236-1,237 vs Speechify Simba 3.2 ~1,234 (press, July 2026)
- Technical report arXiv 2607.23938 (submitted 2026-07-27): 12.5 Hz tokenizer, five-stage LM + flow-matching training, SOTA claims on SEED-TTS-Eval and CV3-Eval
- 16 languages, 20 Chinese dialect regions, up to 3 minutes of one-pass long-form output, natural-language and inline-tag control, voice cloning and Voice Design
- Plus: $27.59 per 1M characters vs Eleven v3 $100 (press)
- The first-place ranking did not last: Inworld TTS-2, Cartesia Sonic 3.6 and Eleven v4 (2026-09-28) led later
What happened
Alibaba released a new generation of hosted TTS models built on a low-frame-rate tokenizer and a multi-stage training recipe, with strong control features (instructions, inline tags, dialects, long-form output). Its Plus tier topped the Artificial Analysis blind-listening arena at launch.
Why it matters
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. Alibaba followed two months later with Qwen-Audio-3.1 and price cuts of about 70%.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 primary, 1 press
Primary
- arXiv 2607.23938 - Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS technical reportarxiv.org, paper
- Model Studio - non-real-time speech synthesis (qwen-audio-3.0-tts-flash)alibabacloud.com, docs
- Artificial Analysis - text-to-speech leaderboardartificialanalysis.ai, docs
Press
- MarkTechPost - Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS in Flash and Plus tiers across 16 languagesmarktechpost.com, press
Changes
- Filed