Google Ships Gemini 3.8 Live and Claims the Top Speech-to-Speech Score at 82.6

Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking on 15 September, a pair of live dialogue models that reach developers through the Gemini application programming interface (API) and Google AI Studio, and reach end users through Search Live, Gemini Live, Gemini Enterprise and Google Workspace. The cheaper model is built for high-volume use. Extended Thinking is built for multi-step work: it reasons while still speaking, continuing tool calls and API requests in the background instead of pausing the conversation.

Google reports that Extended Thinking takes first place on Artificial Analysis' Speech to Speech Quality Index with a score of 82.6, scores 97.7 percent on Big Bench Audio, and leads agentic voice task completion at 68.6 percent on τ-Voice and 35.1 percent on Sierra's τ-Voice-banking. The standard model placed second in Artificial Analysis' Speech Agent Arena. Both models detect and switch among 97 languages mid-conversation and accept camera input in near real time, as summarized in Russian-language coverage and in MarkTechPost's write-up.

The agentic-task numbers are more informative than the quality index. A 35.1 percent completion rate on banking voice tasks means the best-scoring model fails roughly two of every three scripted financial interactions end to end, which is the gap between a convincing demo and an unsupervised customer-service deployment. The index placements come from an independent evaluator, but the selection of which benchmarks to publish is Google's, and no external reproduction of the full set exists yet. Google also describes the pricing as competitive with rival frontier models without committing to a published comparison.