Google launches Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking voice models

According to the company's announcement, Gemini 3.8 Live is aimed at high-volume, cost-sensitive deployments, while the Extended Thinking variant targets multi-step tasks and can reason while it speaks, offering brief spoken acknowledgments as it works. Google said the models handle visual input in near real time, switch automatically among 97 supported languages within a conversation, and run tool and API calls in the background without pausing the dialogue.

Gemini 3.8 Live powers Search Live, while the Extended Thinking model is coming to Gemini Live and to voice features in Gmail, Docs and Keep for Google AI subscribers. Business access is in private preview through Gemini Enterprise. Google's pricing page lists the models at $0.005 per minute of audio input and $0.018 per minute of audio output.

Google cited a score of 82.6 for the Extended Thinking model on the Speech to Speech Quality Index run by benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis, which heise online reported placed it first, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 at 81.5. Other figures in the post, including 68.6% on the tau-Voice agent benchmark, are company-reported. Google said all generated audio carries its SynthID watermark.