Last week Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live and Live Extended Thinking models, touting them as the company’s most advanced live dialogue models yet. The idea, it said, was to give “developers and enterprises… building blocks for reliable, production ready voice agents.” It also made speaking back to Gemini more natural, so users can do complex tasks with voice commands.
Now, Google has added video to that formula with Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar. It pairs near real-time visual presence to the live dialogue models, creating “an experience that listens, sees and speaks with a dynamic visual persona.” In a nutshell, these are avatars designed to do things like sales support and customer service, so you may be interacting with them in the near future.
In several videos in the blog, Google shows both realistic and cartoon-like Avatars. They can do things like precise lip-syncing, natural expressions and “fluid turn-taking.” Using them, the company says, will enable natural, multimodal conversations by allowing the avatars to communicate using facial expressions while also looking, listening and speaking. The avatars are backed by Gemini’s advanced reasoning, allowing Live Avatar to trigger tool calls and fetch data in the background while continuing an active dialogue.
Google will offer a library of “diverse, preset avatars,” or organizations can customize their own from high-quality reference images to preserve “reference likeness, brand styling or character identity.” Those are only available through enterprise allowlisting, the company added. The Live Avatars are also built with “strict safeguards designed to respect identity and keep AI-generated content transparent,” with each one watermarked using Google’s SynthID.
As mentioned, Live Avatar is designed strictly for Google’s Gemini Enterprise customers. However, you may see the results some day soon in the form of customer service or sales avatar appearing on your computer or phone screen. Base on what Google has shown so far, and people’s distaste for AI slop, they may not be universally popular.
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