Most text-to-speech systems have been judged on one thing: whether the voice sounds human. That matters, but it is less useful to a studio producing an audiobook or a game character, where the voice also has to laugh on cue and slow down when the scene calls for it.
Alibaba's new Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS is built with that second group in mind. The model turns written text into speech across several languages and Chinese dialects, and it lets users shape the delivery with plain-language instructions. Tone, tempo and speaking style do not require technical parameters. A short description is enough.
Predicting how fast artificial intelligence will improve usually falls to a familiar group: professors at leading universities, heavily cited AI researchers and seasoned economists. They are the people policymakers and businesses turn to when they want a sense of what comes next.
According to a detailed interim report from the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI), that group has often been too cautious. On benchmarks and on some adoption indicators, progress over the past few years has run well ahead of what experts expected.
Who was asked: a panel built from the top of the field
The FRI has been gathering forecasts on AI progress since mid-2022 through several studies and projects. The first round of its Longitudinal Expert AI Panel, or LEAP, included 339 experts: 76 computer scientists, 76 industry specialists, 68 economists and 119 AI policy professionals. Among the computer scientists were 30 professors at top-20 institutions and 10 of the 200 most-cited AI authors.
Most talk about AI on phones has so far centred on the chatbot: a box you type into, an answer that comes back. That works for looking up facts. It is less useful for someone whose train has been cancelled and who now needs to rebook the journey, move a meeting and tell a friend they will be late.
That is the kind of problem Alibaba is aiming at with Qwen Intelligence. It is not a single app you download. It is a platform that smartphone makers can build into their own system assistants, so its AI functions sit inside the phone rather than on top of it. The stated goals are practical: replanning trips, adjusting appointments and creating images.
CyrioX is financed by advertising. You can choose how you want to use this website:
With advertising: we load an advertising script from a third-party ad network. The ad network may set cookies, use your IP address and device information, and may process data outside the EU.
Ad-free for €0.99 per month: no advertising and no advertising tracking. Cancel at any time.
You can change your decision at any time via "Cookie Settings" at the bottom of every page.
