Google's Gemini 3.8 Live talks in 97 languages, calls tools in the background while it speaks, and costs about $1.38 an hour

Released September 15. Two voice models: Gemini 3.8 Live for scale and cost, and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking for multi-step jobs. Both switch languages mid-sentence across 97 languages, see near real-time video, and make API calls in the background while the conversation keeps going. Extended Thinking narrates its progress out loud while it works. Google's own numbers: 82.6 on the Speech to Speech Quality Index, which it says is the top score, 68.6 percent on the tau-Voice agent test, 97.7 percent on Big Bench Audio, and second place on Speech Agent Arena. Google's API pricing page lists audio at $0.005 a minute in and $0.018 a minute out. The Decoder works that out to about $1.38 an hour, against at least $3.00 an hour for OpenAI's GPT-Live-1. Live now in the Gemini API and AI Studio, in Search Live and the Gemini Live app, and in Workspace for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Enterprise is a private preview. Every audio clip it makes carries a SynthID watermark. Why it matters: if you run a phone agent, the cost floor for the voice layer just dropped by more than half. What to watch: all the benchmark numbers are Google's. Wait for the public Speech Agent Arena board to update.