Gemini 3.8 Live tops speech quality index while reasoning and talking at once
Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
Google's new Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking models bring near real-time reasoning to voice agents. Extended Thinking captures the #1 spot on Artificial Analysis' Speech to Speech Quality Index with 82.6 and hits 68.6% on τ-Voice, while Live offers cost-efficient, visual grounding and switches between 97 languages mid-conversation. Both roll out today via the Gemini API, AI Studio, Search Live, and Gemini Enterprise.
For tasks that require deeper reasoning, 3.8 Live Extended Thinking reasons and speaks simultaneously.
- jeanbza
My first language is Afrikaans, which is a somewhat niche language and hard to find teachers/conversation buddies outside South Africa. (I live in USA now)
I've been using Gemini to live chat in Afrikaans and do impromptu Afrikaans grammar lessons during my solo drives around town. It is phenomenal at speaking the language - like, it really shocks my family members when they hear it.
This is probably the most joy I get from any of my usages of LLMs/AIs. It's been really, really nice getting to speak my language regularly again. =)
So, I'm excited about this release and live chat getting better. I also hope the other frontier labs pick up niche languages like this as well so that I have more options.
- Havoc
Just gave it a try - very solid release.
Copes well with thick accent, voices are pleasant and latency seems low.
Oh and I can actually use it on a workspace account - which for most of the recent releases was an account stuck in limbo. Not personal enough for personal offering, not enterprise enough for enterprise.
Well done G - will definitely be using this
- galkk
I don’t understand good experiences people are having with Gemini. It’s the only model that sometimes loses/forgets context in literally next message. Plus feeding unasked product links to responses.
- rdtsc
I wonder when/if we’ll see Gemini beating Fable and Astra. Last year I would have confidently bet Google will overtake the others just because they have the data, the hardware (TPUs) and a fat advertising money pipe and yet they are still behind. Anyone anonymous at Google want to hint when Gemini 4 will be out?
- Zsfe510asG
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
- deviation
Not a great impression to have your demo video demonstrate how one of your 'most advanced' AI models loses to the most common check-mate pattern in all of chess.
- doodlesdev
Gemini's Live Mode is already much better than GPT Voice in my personal experience, even though it was much dumber. It really does feel like talking to a real person. ChatGPT keeps humming to whatever I say and has some weird voices.
Excited to try this out! Shame on Google for not releasing Gemini 3.8 for Google AI Plus users yet, though.
- stranded22
Google need to allow saving history and exclude it as training data. I will not use it seriously until this is resolved.
- sahaskatta
Our company's Google Workspace Business only offers 3.6 flash & thinking in the Gemini App. Has anyone else seen 3.7 or 3.8 roll out?
- giancarlostoro
I'm wondering if Google intends to drop the next major version of Gemini Pro as a total bombshell drop to make Anthropic and OpenAI panic. They seem to be taking their sweet time on frontier model updates.