As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/m/qwen3-8-livetranslate/

# Qwen3.8-LiveTranslate (Flash Realtime)

Alibaba (Qwen), Qwen3.8 family. Status: current. Type: speech and audio. Released: 2026-09-19.

## How to call it

| Provider | Model id | Endpoint | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|
| QwenCloud (Realtime WebSocket) | `qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime` | wss://maas.qwencloudapi.com/api-ws/v1/realtime?model=qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime | https://www.qwencloud.com/models/qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime |
| Alibaba Cloud Model Studio | `qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime` |  | https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/models |

## Pricing

- Audio input: $7.50 per 1M tokens
- Image input: $0.55 per 1M tokens
- Text output: $20 per 1M tokens
- Audio output: $30 per 1M tokens
- Unit as published: USD per 1M tokens (QwenCloud list price; press estimates about $1.54 per hour of speech in and out)
- Source: https://www.qwencloud.com/models/qwen3.8-livetranslate-flash-realtime
- Last checked: 2026-09-29

## Specs

- Input: audio, image, text
- Output: audio, text
- Context window: 53,248 tokens
- Max output: 4,096 tokens
- Open weights: no
- Licence: proprietary

## Where it stands

- Newer speech and audio models in the registry since its release: 22. The 5 newest:
  - NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe (30B-A4B) (2026-10-28) https://postcutoff.com/m/nemotron-3-5-transcribe/
  - Hy-SimulMT-30B-A3B (2026-10-22) https://postcutoff.com/m/hy-simulmt-30b-a3b/
  - Eleven Realtime v1 Max / Mini (2026-10-20) https://postcutoff.com/m/eleven-realtime-v1-max/
  - Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 (+ Mini Transcribe Realtime 3) (2026-10-20) https://postcutoff.com/m/voxtral-mini-transcribe-3/
  - Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 (2026-10-20) https://postcutoff.com/m/voxtral-small-transcribe-3/
- Before it from Alibaba: Qwen3-ASR (0.6B / 1.7B) + Qwen3-ForcedAligner (2026-01-29) https://postcutoff.com/m/qwen3-asr/
- After it from Alibaba: Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Next (2026-09-22) https://postcutoff.com/m/qwen-audio-3-1-tts-next/
- Closed weights; access is hosted only.

## What stands out

- 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: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2101206705111757253
- 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: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2101206705111757253
- Long-context disambiguation: Uses conversation history to keep names and terminology consistent across a session. Source: https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2101206705111757253

## Notes

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.

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

Model page: https://postcutoff.com/m/qwen3-8-livetranslate/