Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B
Open-weight, multilingual TTS with ultra-low-latency streaming and voice cloning, developed by Alibaba's Qwen team.
Overview
What is Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B
Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B is a multilingual text-to-speech model developed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team, released in January 2026. It supports expressive, streaming speech generation in 10 major languages, with features like natural language voice control, voice cloning, and end-to-end synthesis latency as low as 97ms.
Running it privately on Venice
Running on Venice, Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B ensures your speech prompts are never stored or profiled — zero retention by design. This open-weight model gives you sovereignty over voice generation, enabling private, uncensored deployment without vendor lock-in. You maintain full control over data and usage.
Assessment
Strengths and limitations
- Open weights under Apache 2.0 license: fully self-hostable and modifiable, giving you full sovereignty over voice generation.
- Supports ultra-low-latency streaming with end-to-end synthesis latency as low as 97ms, ideal for real-time interactive applications.
- Multilingual support across 10 major languages with dialectal voice profiles for global reach.
- Advanced voice control via natural language instructions, enabling tone, emotion, and speaking rate adjustments.
- Robust to noisy input text and supports voice cloning and custom voice design.
- Not uncensored: content moderation policies may apply despite open weights.
- No TEE or end-to-end encryption on Venice, so runtime privacy is limited to zero retention.
- Lower parameter count compared to some proprietary rivals may affect voice nuance in complex emotional contexts.
Samples
Sample outputs
Generated on Venice with our standard prompt suite — the same scripts we run through every model of this type, so you can judge it like-for-like.
“On Venice, your prompts are processed privately and never stored, profiled, or used to train anyone's model.”
“Wait — so I can run a private voice model with zero data retention, and pay only for what I use? That's genuinely useful.”
“Three… two… one… liftoff! The rocket roared into the night sky as the crowd erupted in cheers.”
Specifications
Datasheet
- Maker
- Alibaba Cloud
- Released
- January 2026
- Modality
- Text-to-speech
- Languages
- Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian
- Architecture
- Dual-Track LM with Qwen3-TTS-Tokenizer-12Hz
- Parameters
- 1.7B
- Open weights
- Yes — Apache 2.0
- Privacy on Venice
- Private — zero retention
- Available on Venice since
- Mar 2026
- License
- Apache License 2.0
API
Call it from your code
Venice exposes an OpenAI-compatible API. Point your base URL at Venice and pass the model id.
curl https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/audio/speech \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "tts-qwen3-1-7b",
"input": "On Venice, your prompts are processed privately.",
"voice": "af_sky",
"response_format": "mp3"
}' --output speech.mp3Pricing
What it costs on Venice
Billed per character on Venice: $112.50 per 1M characters of synthesized speech.
New Venice accounts include a free daily allowance and 500 welcome credits — no credit card required.
Alternatives
How it compares
| Model | Best for | Latency | Open weights | Voice cloning | Price (Venice) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B | Open-weight leader with ultra-low latency and full voice control. | 97ms | Yes | Yes | $112.50 / 1M chars |
| Chatterbox HD (Resemble AI) | High-quality but closed; lower cost with strong cloning. | — | No | Yes | $50 / 1M chars |
| ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 | Popular for realism, but proprietary and higher latency. | — | No | Yes | $62.50 / 1M chars |
| Kokoro Text to Speech | Cheapest open option, but fewer languages and lower fidelity. | — | Yes | Yes | $3.50 / 1M chars |
| Inworld TTS-1.5 Max | Very low cost, but closed and limited customization. | — | No | Yes | $12.50 / 1M chars |
Open-weight leader with ultra-low latency and full voice control.
Use cases
What it is good for
- 01Real-time voice assistants and interactive agents requiring low-latency speech output.
- 02Multilingual customer service bots with natural, expressive voices.
- 03Custom voice branding and voice cloning for content creators and enterprises.
- 04Privacy-sensitive applications where speech prompts must not be stored or logged.
- 05Self-hosted TTS deployments in regulated or offline environments.
Prompting
Getting better results
Use natural language instructions to control tone and emotion (e.g., 'speak excitedly' or 'in a calm tone').
For voice cloning, provide a clear, high-quality reference audio snippet.
Leverage streaming mode for real-time applications — the first audio packet emits after a single character input.
Version history
Lightweight variant optimized for efficiency.
Current — full-featured, high-performance model.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B is a multilingual text-to-speech model developed by Alibaba Cloud's Qwen team, released in January 2026. It supports expressive, streaming speech generation in 10 major languages with features like voice cloning and natural language voice control.
On Venice, Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B is priced at $112.50 per 1 million characters of synthesized speech. There are no subscriptions — you pay only for what you generate.
Yes, Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, with open weights available on Hugging Face and GitHub. You can use, modify, and self-host it freely.
Yes, Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B supports vivid voice cloning and free-form voice design, allowing you to create or replicate voices using short reference samples and natural language descriptions.
It supports 10 major languages: Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, with support for dialectal voice profiles.
Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B achieves end-to-end synthesis latency as low as 97ms, enabling real-time, streaming speech generation ideal for interactive applications.
Yes. On Venice, Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B runs with zero retention — your prompts are never stored or used for training. This ensures private, sovereign voice generation with full control over data.
Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B offers open weights, lower latency, and self-hosting capability, making it ideal for private, customizable deployments. ElevenLabs Turbo v2.5 excels in voice realism and ease of use but is closed and more expensive per character.
Run Qwen 3 TTS 1.7B privately
No prompt logging. No data used for training.