Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar gives Google’s AI a face

Google’s Live Avatar can lip-sync and show different facial expressions.

Google’s Live Avatar can lip-sync and show different facial expressions.

by Emma RothSep 24, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

Image: GoogleEmma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

Google’s new Gemini 3.8 Live update lets users have conversations with the model while watching an animated AI persona respond in real time. The “Live Avatar” will lip-sync and show different facial expressions during conversations, but it’s currently only available to Gemini Enterprise customers.

As noted by Google, Live Avatar can transition between the 97 languages it supports “without degrading video fidelity or introducing visual drift.” One video shared by Google shows its Live Avatar talking in English and Japanese, with its mouth animation lining up with what it’s saying in both languages. It can also pull up information on-screen while it talks.

The launch of Live Avatar comes about a week after Google revealed its new Gemini 3.8 Live model, which the company says “processes visual inputs in near real-time.” Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their own. Google says output from its Live Avatar comes with its invisible SynthID watermark alongside safeguards to “respect identity.”

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• Emma Roth

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