Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate (Flash Realtime)
Understands 60 languages and speaks 29 (the rest get text-only translation). Thinker-talker hybrid MoE on the Qwen-Omni stack (press). API-only, no open weights and no announced timeline for them. MindStudio's hands-on found short sentences fine but weak end-of-turn detection, so developers need their own turn-taking logic. Announced on X 2026-09-19 (294k views by 2026-09-29), shortly before Apsara 2026.
- Context window
- 53,248 tokens
- Max output
- 4,096 tokens
- Input
- audio, image, text
- Output
- audio, text
- License
- proprietary
- Pricing
- audio input: $7.5 · image input: $0.55 · text output: $20 · audio output: $30 (USD per 1M tokens (QwenCloud list price; press estimates about $1.54 per hour of speech in and out)) source
- Verified
- 2026-09-29
How to call it
| Provider | Model id | Endpoint / URL | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| QwenCloud (Realtime WebSocket) | qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime | wss://maas.qwencloudapi.com/api-ws/v1/realtime?model=qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime | docs |
| Alibaba Cloud Model Studio | qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime | — | docs |
Notable capabilities (3)
- Simultaneous interpretation with lower lag: Streams translated speech and text while the speaker is still talking; average lagging (LAAL) cut from 2.8 s to 2.3 s across 60 languages with a new 'Interleave' architecture. source
- Multi-speaker diarization with per-speaker voice cloning: Tells speakers apart in multi-party speech and keeps each speaker's own voice in the translated audio; synchronized bilingual on-screen display. source
- Long-context disambiguation: Uses conversation history to keep names and terminology consistent across a session. source
Alibaba's hosted real-time interpretation model, a competitor to gpt-realtime-translate and Gemini 3.5 Live Translate.
Sources: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2101206705111757253 · https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8-livetranslate · https://www.qwencloud.com/models/qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime · https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/09/19/alibaba-qwen-team-releases-qwen3-8-livetranslate/ · https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/qwen3-8-livetranslate-hands-on
Timeline entry
- Alibaba launches Qwen-Audio-3.1 five-model voice stack and cuts audio API prices up to 95% ★★★
Around its 2026 Apsara Conference Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Audio-3.1: upgraded ASR, TTS and full-duplex Realtime models plus two new ones (ASR-Next for audio understanding, TTS-Next for one-pass speech+SFX+ambience generation), with price cuts of ~70% (TTS), ~85% (Realtime) and up to 95%…
Other Alibaba (Qwen) models
Qwen-Audio-3.1-ASR (Flash) · Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime (Plus) · Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next · Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash · Qwen3.8-27B · Qwen3.8-Flash · Qwen3.8-Max · Qwen-Image-3.0 (Pro) · Qwen3.7-Plus · Qwen3-ASR (0.6B / 1.7B) + Qwen3-ForcedAligner · Qwen3-TTS (open weights 0.6B / 1.7B; API qwen3-tts-flash)