Alibaba's Qwen Audio 3.1 Cuts AI Audio Prices

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Audio-3.1, five models covering speech recognition, text-to-speech and real-time interaction. ASR-Next adds speaker identification, timestamps and emotion detection; TTS-Next generates voice, sound effects and background audio in one pass. Alibaba cut prices sharply: TTS about 70 percent, Realtime roughly 85 percent, and ASR up to 95 percent, intensifying competition in cloud AI audio services.