Alibaba has launched a new voice AI model, slashing API prices by up to 95%. Following similar price cuts by OpenAI and Anthropic earlier this week, Chinese companies are joining the escalating AI price war.
According to the IT industry on September 26, Alibaba's Q1 team unveiled its voice model series 'Q1-Audio-3.1' on September 23. The series includes five models, improving existing automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), and real-time voice conversation capabilities, while adding 'TTS-Next' for audio production and 'ASR-Next' for audio comprehension. The price reductions are approximately 70% for TTS, 85% for real-time voice conversation, and up to 95% for ASR.
The performance has also been enhanced. The real-time voice conversation model allows for simultaneous listening and speaking, enabling interruptions at any point during a conversation. ASR-Next can distinguish multiple speakers, attach timestamps, and recognize emotions and background sounds. Industry experts suggest that companies using voice APIs from Deepgram, Eleven Labs, and OpenAI may need to reassess costs before renewing contracts.
On September 22, American AI companies also announced simultaneous price cuts. Anthropic set the price for its new flagship model 'Claude Opus 5.5' at $4 per 1 million tokens for input and $20 for output, a 20% reduction from its predecessor, Opus 5. The cash reading price was set at $0.20, a 60% decrease. Anthropic noted that operational costs for typical tasks are about 40% lower than the previous version.
OpenAI followed Anthropic's announcement with the release of 'GPT-6 Sol' and 'GPT-6 Luna.' Sol is priced at $2 for input and $10 for output, while Luna is set at $0.10 for input and $0.50 for output, both at half the price of their predecessors. OpenAI confirmed that these prices are not temporary discounts but standard rates.
Chinese companies are offering even lower prices. Xiaomi priced its 'MiMo-V2.6-Pro,' released on September 21, at $0.435 for input and $0.87 for output, roughly one-ninth the input price of Opus 5.5. This model scored 46 points on the Artificial Analysis intelligence index, ranking first among open-weight models. Xiaomi has made the model weights available on Hugging Face under an MIT license. The lightweight model 'MiMo-V2.6-Flash' is priced at $0.14 for input and $0.28 for output.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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