Google DeepMind Launches Gemini 3.8 Live with Animated AI Avatars

Google DeepMind has introduced Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, an enterprise feature that pairs near real-time video generation with speech to produce animated AI personas capable of lip-synced, expressive conversations. The feature supports simultaneous vision and audio input, asynchronous tool calling for background data fetching during conversations, and native speech-to-speech synchronization across 97 languages without degrading video quality. Organizations can create custom avatars from a reference image to preserve brand styling or character identity, though that capability requires enterprise allowlisting. All audio and video output is watermarked with SynthID to keep AI-generated content detectable.