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.
Gemini is underrated in that it produces the only prose that is somewhat bearable to read.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
Google need to allow saving history and exclude it as training data. I will not use it seriously until this is resolved.
Agreed. They really are the greediest when it comes to data for training (unsurprising for google I guess)
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.
My issue using the voice mode is the overly expressive mimicry of natural human intonation is distracting and starts to become extremely grating after a while.
There's one or two I find more understated but I would love a 2026 SOTA V2V model that speaks clearly but without the artificial personality layered on.
Human interaction/theory of mind relies so much on non-verbal clues for interpreting emotion/intent and so for me having those neurons firing constantly while talking to an LLM just for an emotional no-op is exhausting to put up with for more than a couple minutes.
There's one male voice that would make me assume someone was sarcastically mocking me if I was talking to an actual person because it's just so over the top.
One of the new Siri voice demos sounded like a lover whispering inuendo into my ear.
I don’t want to be aroused by my turn-by-turn street directions, thanks.
Did anybody watch the Primeagen's video on Google bag-fumbling? Interesting they released on the same day!
well, its because gemini is sucks at coding
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.
Great tech but the voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me
Which one? I like Eclipse