The voice model price floor just collapsed, and the open-weight option undercut the incumbents.…
the voice model price floor just collapsed, and the open-weight option undercut the incumbents. alibaba's qwen-audio-3.1, out september 23, ships five speech models covering asr, tts and realtime while cutting asr prices by up to 95 percent and tts by about 70.
the margin game moved to audio before anyone noticed.
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The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 23 September 2026 at 21:52 IST.
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