104 ms median and 138 ms P95 time to first audio on Coval (30 days to October 22, 2026): Fast enough speed tier.
Benchmark summary: Fast enough speed tier on Coval's P95 (fast enough for most agents).
Alibaba Qwen3 TTS 1.7b is an open-weights text-to-speech (TTS) API from Alibaba (Qwen), served by Baseten, measured by one independent benchmark, Coval.
Speed tier
Fast enoughP95 from 138 ms to 263 ms. Fast enough for most agents.
Data read October 22, 2026. No combined score: methodology
Gradium TTS vs Alibaba Qwen3 TTS 1.7b Fastest TTS APIs, by speed tierOn Coval's 30-day window ending October 22, 2026 (2,166 runs from US East), Alibaba Qwen3 TTS 1.7b starts speaking after 103.9 ms on a typical turn (median) and 137.8 ms on a slow turn (P95, the slowest one in twenty). That P95 is 5th lowest of the 32 models Coval measures, which puts it in the Fast enough tier: fast enough for most agents. On the median it is a tie (gap under 10 ms) with Palabra TTS v1, SpeechifyAI Simba 3.0 and SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2.
Neither Speko nor Artificial Analysis rates its voice quality.
Speko has not scored its pronunciation of numbers and dates.
No list price is published by Coval, Speko or Artificial Analysis for this model.
The benchmarks measure this model through Baseten's API, so the latency above is Baseten's. Coval's model registry names Alibaba (Qwen) as the creator and Baseten as the host.
SpeechifyAI Simba 3.0 is a proprietary text-to-speech (TTS) API from Speechify, measured by two independent benchmarks: Artificial Analysis and Coval.
SpeechifyAI Simba 3.2 is a proprietary text-to-speech (TTS) API from Speechify, measured by three independent benchmarks: Artificial Analysis, Coval and Speko.
Alibaba Qwen3 TTS Fast is an open-weights text-to-speech (TTS) API from Alibaba (Qwen), served by Nari Labs, measured by two independent benchmarks: Coval and Speko.