Google Gives Gemini 3.8 Live an Animated Face — SkimNews
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- Google launched Live Avatar for Gemini 3.8 Live, giving the AI an animated face that lip-syncs and displays different facial expressions in real time during conversations.
- Live Avatar supports 97 languages, with Google claiming it can transition between them "without degrading video fidelity or introducing visual drift" — a demo video shows it speaking in both English and Japanese.
- Google is restricting Live Avatar to Gemini Enterprise customers only, while offering a library of preset avatars and letting organizations build their own custom personas.
- Live Avatar output carries Google's invisible SynthID watermark alongside identity safeguards, and the feature can also pull up on-screen information while it talks.
- Gemini 3.8 Live, the underlying model, "processes visual inputs in near real-time" according to Google and was revealed about a week before the Live Avatar launch.
Why it matters: By gating Live Avatar behind Gemini Enterprise, Google is pitching a face-and-voice AI persona as an enterprise collaboration tool rather than a consumer feature — putting it in direct competition with Microsoft's Copilot and other workplace AI suites where avatar-based agents could replace text chat interfaces for internal use.
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