Google DeepMind Launches Gemini 3.8 Live with Real-Time Video Avatars

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