Alibaba launches Qwen-Audio 3.1 and makes AI voices cheaper

On September 23, 2026, the Chinese tech giant Alibaba launched an update to its Qwen-Audio series called Qwen-Audio 3.1. The update consists of five new AI models that can recognize speech, convert text to speech and carry on voice-based conversations in real time.

An API is a kind of digital service that developers can connect their own apps to, for example when a company wants a synthetic voice to read text aloud or recognize what a customer says on the phone. Alibaba is now cutting the price of these services significantly: speech recognition (ASR) becomes up to 95 percent cheaper, real-time conversations about 85 percent cheaper, and text-to-speech (TTS) around 70 percent cheaper.

The new models can do more than before. Speech recognition automatically removes "ums" and repetitions and can recognize more languages and Chinese dialects. A new version called ASR-Next can also distinguish between several speakers, pick up the mood in the voice and recognize background sounds such as machine noise. On the speech side, the new TTS-Next can generate a voice, sound effects and background sound at the same time, while the real-time model can speak and listen at once with a kind of emotional sense of the conversation.

For ordinary Danes, this will hardly be felt directly tomorrow, but the price drop means it becomes cheaper and easier for companies to build voice-based customer service systems, transcription tools and translation solutions. Over time, this could mean you encounter more AI voices in customer service, apps and assistive tools, and that competitors such as Google and OpenAI are also pressured to lower their prices on similar services.

What it means for you

You won't feel it directly tomorrow, but companies and developers can now build voice-based solutions far more cheaply. If you work with customer service, apps or transcription, it may soon be relevant to look at new AI voice tools. At the same time, expect to encounter more synthetic voices in phone support and apps going forward, as prices are pushed down at more providers.