Volcengine’s Doubao 1.6-Vision Cuts Costs by 50% with New Tool-Calling Multimodal Model

Volcengine, ByteDance’s cloud and AI services unit, has launched Doubao 1.6-Vision, the first in its model family to feature tool-calling for advanced visual reasoning tasks. The multimodal model supports precise image operations such as cropping, selection, scaling, rotation, and annotation, and is accessible via the Responses API. Compared with the previous Doubao-1.5-Thinking-Vision-Pro, the new release cuts overall costs by about 50%. For a typical 32K input-output scenario, pricing has dropped from RMB 5.25 (US$0.72) to RMB 2.6 (US$0.36), making it more cost-effective for customers requiring high-accuracy visual understanding. [TechNode reporting]