Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, in the API today

Both are available now through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio at $0.005 per minute of audio input and $0.018 per minute of audio output.³ For a voice agent the useful part is asynchronous function calling — tool calls run in the background while audio keeps streaming — alongside visual grounding, mid-conversation switching across 97 languages, and alphanumeric parsing for confirmation codes.³⁴

Relevant to: If you have been stitching a cascaded stack out of a recogniser, a model and a voice, this collapses three hops into one, with Live API integrations through LiveKit, Pipecat and Vercel.[^3] Enterprise access is still private preview.