Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS lets you build a voice from a 30-second sample

Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech says hello

Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS lets you build a voice from a 30-second sample

Google's new Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS models turn voice generation into a creative studio. You can design voices from scratch with natural-language prompts, replicate a voice from a 30-second sample, and direct line-by-line delivery with cues like <laughs> or |mhm|. Both models top Hume AI's quality benchmarks, support over 100 languages, and ship with SynthID watermarking and consent verification.

Scale up from 30 original voices to an infinite library.
  1. rcr-anti

    Pet peeve on Google's AI rollouts: there's no alignment across the three platforms they have, consumer, prosumer, cloud. Scroll to the end of every release, including this one, and you'll see different availabilities. The fun part is the models don't even have the same capabilities across platforms! Omni Flash, last I tried and read the docs, is video and text out on consumer and prosumer but video out only on GCP. So if your org disables consumer and prosumer, like mine, it's a coin flip whether you can use the fancy new models or what they can do.

  2. simonw

    > Voice replication: Recreate consistent vocal profiles from just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have the rights to use, backed by built-in consent verification, SynthID watermarking, and C2PA credentials to protect both developers and their vocal talent.

    I guess voice cloning is widely enough available now from other providers that Google are no longer hesitant to ship it.

  3. thangalin

    Here's a video of my Emotive Audiobook Creator, KeenLore, a locally hosted web app:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAeHgE94rVo

    No cloud, no tokens to pay. Reads a book using a full cast of characters. Quotation attribution detection (for my novel) is at 97.2% accuracy (485/499 quotes identified and assigned correctly). The autofill of character voice descriptions uses the prose to determine how the character sounds.

    Employs Gemma 4[1] for the prose analysis (voice fills, quotation detection) and Qwen3 TTS Voice Design[2] for creating voice samples. Runs on an 8GB NVIDIA T1000 GPU card, 96 GB RAM, and a AMD Ryzen 5 7600.

    [1]: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/gemma-4/

    [2]: https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-Voice-Design

  4. Multicomp

    I direct my own extended daydream Star Trek fanfic (okay, I'm on season 2 episode 17) and recently I looked to see if I could have each scene file be read aloud a la an audiobook or radio drama.

    Getting GPT-Live to have unique enough voices and to be expressive with how I imagine the voices going in my head is hard to direct, there's not enough control there.

    So this Gemini 3.8 specific large voice library and ability to tightly control (if you are willing to write a script) is nice to find, and while I'm not sure which of the 5,286 Gemini products this is, nor how to onboard and get started feeding this my own text files, nor what training will happen to my data if I did somehow use it, I love that the state of the industry is such that Google can do this and release it publicly, because that means eventually an equivalent product can come from someone else and be used locally / confidently that the generated audio or inputs won't be retained and misused.

  5. seemaze

    My primary use case for TTS is converting written content (blogs, articles, etc.) in to clips I can listen to on the go.

    Is there a good browser extension that does this with a flexible TTS backend? I know Qwen, Kokoro, and VibeVoice all have decent quality..

  6. accountrequired

    "users must provide a verbal consent recording from the voice owner that matches the reference speaker before a voice can be created"

    How long is this stored? What could go wrong? :P

  7. dangoodmanUT

    In their demo for "Monologue" (2nd video over, after the medeival video game example), it is clearly ignoring the vocal cues like `<chuckles>` and `<laughing>`...

  8. nater5000

    It's giving me an error when I try to generate a voice with Voice Design in AI Studio. It also says voice replication isn't available in my region.

    Also weird that there are no "neutral gender" voices in the English language. There's also limited "use cases," like the "Gaming" use case is empty?

    And there's no pricing listed anywhere.

    I don't know, I guess their roll out is a bit sloppy. It's a bit of a shame, though, since the voices which are available all sound like generic Gemini voices to me. Nothing stands out is being particularly interesting or impressive about this.

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2026-09-23