Google's Gemini 3.8 Live Tops an Independent Speech Leaderboard at a Tenth of OpenAI's Voice Price

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking through the Gemini application programming interface (API) and AI Studio, aiming at real-time voice agents rather than text chat. The Extended Thinking variant took first place on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Quality Index with 82.6, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 models.

The ranking comes from a third party rather than Google, which makes it more useful than a vendor chart, though Artificial Analysis runs a fixed suite and one index does not establish turn-taking quality, interruption handling or latency under load. Google also reported 68.6 percent on the agentic voice benchmark τ-Voice and 35.1 percent on Sierra's banking variant, figures that have not been independently reproduced. The model supports more than 97 languages and can place API calls in the background while continuing to speak.

The price difference matters more. Google charges $0.005 per minute of audio input and $0.018 per minute of output, against $0.05 per minute for GPT-Live-1.

OpenAI made a comparable cut elsewhere in its product line. It reduced the cost of voice control for Work and Codex agents in the ChatGPT desktop client by close to 60 percent, giving users roughly 2.4 times more voice time for the same credits, and it now bills the voice stream separately from the computing a task consumes. That separation lets the company change the price of conversation without changing the price of the work itself.