The Information Machine

This story was merged into Google DeepMind's Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS →

Merged·New·in the edition since 26 Sep 2026·2 sources·updated 26 Sep 2026

Google DeepMind's Gemini Live Avatar

The gist

Google DeepMind Launches Gemini 3.8 Live with Animated AI Avatars

The feature brings lip-synced, multilingual AI video personas to enterprise use cases, combining conversational AI with real-time video generation. Google DeepMind states that SynthID watermarking is applied to all output to help minimize misinformation and misattribution.

The full picture

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.

How it developed
First in the edition · 26 September 2026
25 September 2026

Google DeepMind published Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar on September 24, pairing near real-time video generation with speech to produce animated AI personas with lip-syncing.

The feature supports asynchronous tool calling for background data fetching during conversations, native speech-to-speech across 97 languages, and simultaneous vision and audio input. Organizations can build custom avatars from a reference image to preserve brand styling, subject to enterprise allowlisting, and all output is watermarked with SynthID to keep AI-generated content detectable.

Sources
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