Alibaba launches Qwen-Audio-3.1 five-model voice stack and cuts audio API prices up to 95%
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 30 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra146 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.585 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen176 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7115 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 85 days before it.
Key facts
- Five models: Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR, -ASR-Next, -TTS, -TTS-Next, -Realtime
- qwen-audio-3.1-realtime-plus: 262K context; $6.40 audio in / $24 audio out per 1M tokens on QwenCloud
- Realtime task success 82.0% (from 78.4%); response rate to background speech cut from 73.0% to 13.0% (arXiv 2609.25176)
- qwen-audio-3.1-tts-next (model docs dated 2026-09-22): zh/en, up to 3,000 chars, up to 240 s podcast output
- Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate (announced 2026-09-19, id qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime): LAAL latency cut from 2.8 s to 2.3 s; 60 input / 29 voice-output languages; $7.50 audio in / $30 audio out per 1M tokens; API-only
What happened
Alibaba’s Qwen team shipped a complete hosted audio stack in one release: recognition (ASR, ASR-Next with diarization, emotion and sound-event detection), synthesis (TTS with cross-language voice transfer, TTS-Next that mixes speech, sound effects and ambience in one pass) and a full-duplex Realtime model with tool use and web search. It came two months after Qwen-Audio-3.0 (July 2026, see Alibaba’s Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS takes #1 on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard) and alongside Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate at Apsara 2026.
Why it matters
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.
The exact API ids of the 3.1 TTS and ASR-Next models (not in the international Model Studio docs as of 2026-09-29; only qwen-audio-3.0-tts-flash/-plus and qwen-audio-3.1-asr-flash-streaming/-filetrans are listed), and Model Studio international prices were not verified.
Sources
10 sources from 8 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
10 sources: 8 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Qwen on X - Meet Qwen-Audio-3.1x.com, official
- QwenCloud - qwen-audio-3.1-realtime-plusqwencloud.com, docs
- Model Studio - qwen-audio-3.1-tts-nextalibabacloud.com, docs
- Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime: Towards Reliable Agentic Voice Interactionarxiv.org, paper
- Qwen on X - Meet Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate (2026-09-19)x.com, official
- QwenCloud - qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtimeqwencloud.com, docs
- Qwen blog - Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate: Names the speaker. Carries the meaning.qwen.ai, official
- GitHub - QwenLM/Omnilingua-Benchgithub.com, code
Press
- The Decoder - Qwen Audio 3.1 slashes prices up to 95%the-decoder.com, press
- MarkTechPost - Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtimemarktechpost.com, press
Changes
- Added the official Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate blog post (Qwen blog index date 2026-09-18) and a link to the new Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash entry
- Linked the Qwen-Audio-3.0-TTS and Apsara 2026 entries; recorded which 3.1 API ids are published
- Added verified Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate id, date, pricing and model file qwen3-8-livetranslate
- Filed