DashScope Python SDK

The DashScope Python SDK provides a comprehensive interface to Alibaba Cloud Model Studio (Bailian) APIs, covering text generation, multi-modal understanding, embeddings, reranking, image/video generation, speech synthesis & recognition, and more.

What is New

v1.27.0 ships an interactive AI assistant — DashScope SDK Expert. Run dashscope with no arguments (or ask directly, e.g. dashscope "how do I stream Generation output") to get SDK/API answers, runnable examples, CLI usage, and error diagnosis right in your terminal. Guidance is drawn from per-domain quick-reference skills (text, multimodal, speech, retrieval, fine-tuning, agent, cli) built on the SDK's public interfaces — parameters, outputs, and error codes — so you can ask instead of reading the docs. Type /help inside the assistant to view available commands.

Installation

To install the DashScope Python SDK, simply run:

pip install dashscope

If you clone the code from github, you can install from source by running:

pip install -e .

To use tokenizer in local mode without downloading any files, run:

pip install dashscope[tokenizer]

Quick Start

from http import HTTPStatus
from dashscope import Generation

responses = Generation.call(
    model="qwen-plus",
    messages=[
        {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."},
        {"role": "user", "content": "Who are you?"},
    ],
    result_format="message",
)

if responses.status_code == HTTPStatus.OK:
    print(responses.output.choices[0].message.content)
else:
    print(f"Error: {responses.code} - {responses.message}")

API Key Authentication

The SDK uses API key for authentication. Please refer to official documentation for alibabacloud china and official documentation for alibabacloud international regarding how to obtain your api-key.

Using the API Key

1. Set the API key via code

import dashscope

dashscope.api_key = 'YOUR-DASHSCOPE-API-KEY'
# Or specify the API key file path via code
# dashscope.api_key_file_path='~/.dashscope/api_key'

2. Set the API key via environment variables

a. Set the API key directly using the environment variable below

export DASHSCOPE_API_KEY='YOUR-DASHSCOPE-API-KEY'

b. Specify the API key file path via an environment variable

export DASHSCOPE_API_KEY_FILE_PATH='~/.dashscope/api_key'

3. Save the API key to a file

from dashscope import save_api_key

save_api_key(api_key='YOUR-DASHSCOPE-API-KEY',
             api_key_file_path='api_key_file_location or (None, will save to default location "~/.dashscope/api_key"')

AI Assistant: DashScope SDK Expert

The SDK ships with an interactive AI assistant, DashScope SDK Expert, built on the bundled Agentic CLI (dashscope/acli) framework. For DashScope SDK/CLI users it is the recommended way to get development consultation and AI coding help — answering SDK/API questions, generating runnable examples, showing CLI usage, and diagnosing errors, right in your terminal.

• Run dashscope with no arguments to start the assistant. On first run it offers to install the SDK Expert knowledge pack (per-domain quick-reference skills: text, multimodal, speech, retrieval, fine-tuning, agent, cli), so guidance comes from the SDK's public interfaces — parameters, outputs, error codes — without reading the source
• Ask it instead of reading docs — e.g. dashscope "how do I stream Generation output" or dashscope "CLI command to cancel a fine-tuning job". Type /help inside the assistant to list available commands (/setup, /skill, /stats, ...); classic SDK subcommands still work, and unrecognized commands are routed to the assistant

Supported Models

Category	Recommended Models	SDK Class
Text Generation	qwen3.8-max, qwen3.7-max, qwen3.7-plus, qwen3.6-flash	Generation
Multi-Modal Understanding	qwen3.5-omni-plus, qwen3.7-plus (vision)	MultiModalConversation
Text Embedding	text-embedding-v4, text-embedding-v3	TextEmbedding
Multi-Modal Embedding	tongyi-embedding-vision-plus, qwen3-vl-embedding	MultiModalEmbedding
Text ReRank	qwen3-rerank, gte-rerank-v2	TextReRank
Image Generation	wan2.7-image-pro, qwen-image-2.0-pro	ImageSynthesis
Video Generation	wan2.7-t2v, wan2.7-i2v, happyhorse-1.0-t2v/i2v	VideoSynthesis
Speech Synthesis (TTS)	cosyvoice-v3.5-plus, cosyvoice-v1	SpeechSynthesizer, HttpSpeechSynthesizer
Speech Recognition (ASR)	fun-asr-realtime, fun-asr, paraformer-v1	Transcription
Omni (Real-time)	qwen3.5-omni-plus-realtime	MultiModalConversation

For the latest model list, visit Bailian Model Plaza.

Logging

To output Dashscope logs, you need to configure the logger.

export DASHSCOPE_LOGGING_LEVEL='info'

Output

The output contains the following fields:

     request_id (str): The request id.
     status_code (int): HTTP status code, 200 indicates that the
         request was successful, others indicate an error.
     code (str): Error code if error occurs, otherwise empty str.
     message (str): Set to error message on error.
     output (Any): The request output.
     usage (Any): The request usage information.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License (Version 2.0).