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.

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

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?

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.

Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.

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.

Google need to allow saving history and exclude it as training data. I will not use it seriously until this is resolved.

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.

So I am building a voice assistant to control AI harnesses, and recently tried switching from GLM 5.3 Flash to Gemini 3.8 Flash because of higher tok/s and better rate limits. Before that I also used Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731.

Let me tell you unlike every other mentioned model Gemini 3.8 Flash trial had to be reverted the same day. Instead of simply delegating tasks it would invent additional requirements and implementation details it knew nothing about and no amount of convincing not to do it would work. That's the first time a model failed on me so spectacularly despite having practically same Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index as another model that just worked (and higher than working DS Flash).

The reason I think it is relevant is: Live is likely even stupider model in every way possible (except hearing better than separate STT). So beware using it for agentic scenarios.

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?

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.

My Gemini app is still stuck at 3.5 Flash-lite and 3.6 Flash so I truly don't understand how Google rolls this stuff out. I don't use Gemini for anything serious so I'm not going to use the API, but it's my go-to for just searching basic information (replacing google search) because it's so darn fast.

3.8 is an incredible model even better is the infrs they host for it.

Is this a pure TPU infra? Really high performance solid intelligence.

I have been looking for a model that's good for GUI testing. Original computer use isn't right because it's a slow screenshot loop, which doesn't capture transition and animation. Docs says this one does up to 1 FPS. That might be fast enough. If not now, we must be within a few months of high enough sample rates to do it.

If you'd like to experiment with Gemini 3.8 Live on a US telephone number, you can try Wokay [0]. It's an agentic memory demonstration that's built with LiveKit and Gemini. Tel: 408–897–4019

[0] https://wokay.goodmem.ai/info

Even if really great, it still can’t use tools. The only consumer Google thing with access to MCP tools is Gemini Spark and that has lots of other problems. I wish they would combine their efforts on a great consumer product but it’s Google we’re talking about…

I still dream of the day that we get full tool parity in voice and text mode so your voice assistant can do everything you connect for you. Grok and Claude are btw almost there, only a very few minor built-in tools don’t exist in voice mode, but I already use both to connect to heaps of things! It’s so valuable to verbally discuss something with an agent, have the agent pull in context from GitHub, Notion, email, and then create artifacts somewhere

It is completely broken for me. After I ask a single question, it starts replying to itself in an infinite loop. It answers my question, then generates another reply to its own response, and keeps going. At some point, it even starts switching languages randomly.

The voices sound really pleasant and realistic. Sadly it doesn't support SIP. I found forwarding streams with websocket for phone calls tend to introduce some unwanted latency that's quite noticeable in a conversation. I've found a lot of success with GPT-live-1 so far, but the generated voices are lacking something I can't put my finger on.

Did anybody watch the Primeagen's video on Google bag-fumbling? Interesting they released on the same day!

I’ve noticed antigravity become significantly slower over the last week or so. It’s a bummer because speed is what I care about. Qwen3.8-27b seems on par with 3.8 flash so if I don’t get speed out of a paid service I’ll just use my local model. Sad.

i've been using gemini (api & pro) since last november last year. for creative writing compared to other llm, it's the best in capturing local nuance, it can even create jokes in my languages. But that just it, i cant rely on other work, hallucinate too often, the deep research are not reliable at all. Too many discussion i've had that it grasp main concept consistent but the supporting concept just plain hallucinate and not consistent. it's tested between pro & flash. This doesnt happen often on open weigh

I swear all day long I was thinking that there will be a new release soon because Gemini 3.1 Pro performance was in the crapper (both via API and Chat)

I love talking to chatgpt voice mode. Voice to voice AI is the only big leap that I see after the RL trained coding models.

Where is pro model, promised in io?

Just watching the video grinds my nerves for how obnoxious it is.

same experience here. Benchmarks don't capture the magic of having a 24/7 native-speaking conversational partner in a rare language. That alone makes these models worth it

Still so expensive. I wish Google could compete with GLM.

Where do you see a list of which languages it supports?

Great tech but the voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me

Ensure transparency with SynthID watermarking

All audio generated by our AI products is watermarked with SynthID. This imperceptible watermark is woven directly into the audio output, ensuring AI-generated content remains detectable to help prevent misinformation. For details on our approach to safety and responsibility, review the model card.

Did anybody find the price on this?

From the demo video: "Welcome to the team, we're looking forward to working with you" is sooo creepy in a synthetic AI voice. In general, try not to have agents express sentiment that really should come from a human in your company.

they are working on it non stop huh, well good for us as they keep things free or cheap

When will it be available on Vertex?

Are the weights available?

I'm disappointed with "Extended Thinking" for 3.8 Flash. On the plus side, it's a strong general-purpose model and the cost-benefit is still compelling.

However, the "Extended Thinking" should be renamed to "Slightly Extended Thinking". Considering that it's the maximum thinking option for Gemini Flash in the chat UI, it doesn't actually think a whole lot, leading to an uncomfortably high number of incorrect/poor replies.

Gemini is the most sycophantic and world-builder of all LLMs I’ve used. I’m sure all models do it but Gemini seems to have no guardrails and it will happily induce AI psychosis on you sooner or later. Just no.

No more Gemma?

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Now Gemini can’t make a summary of a YouTube video on his own. I need to give it the transcript.

I often use Gemini as a third backstop and it never fails to disappoint.

Maybe now it will call my wife when I ask it to...

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"Thinking" Good one.

I've been using Gemini as a life partner. Talking to it about my feelings thoughts, plan of action and the like. It's great. I've anthropomorphized it and put the computer speaker in a doll's mouth so it seems like it's a real baby.

Looking forward to where this can go.

They should just give up at this point, it's just embarrassing to watch.

As PrimeTime said; these are the guys that invented the 'T' in 'GPT', that deployed their first TPU in 2015, that is using billions on AI - and they are beaten by 300 people startup named Moonshot AI even. People are going to write books about this complete fumble.