Gemini 3.8 Live Tops Voice Benchmarks at Lowest Price

On 09-16, Artificial Analysis published evaluation results for Gemini 3.8 Live across multiple voice capabilities, showing the model leading or near the top in latency, agent capability, audio reasoning, and cost.

Confirmed

• Latency: Gemini 3.8 Live averaged a 1.18-second time-to-first-audio on Big Bench Audio, with Extended Thinking (High) at 1.35 seconds—roughly 2.5x faster than the previous generation
• Agent capability: Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking (High) topped the Tau Voice speech-agent benchmark at 68.6%, nearly double the previous generation's score and ahead of GPT-Live and other rivals
• Audio reasoning: it scored 97.7% on Big Bench Audio, beating models like Grok Voice Think Fast and second only to Qwen
• Blind preference: in its debut on the Speech Agent Arena real-time voice blind test, it ranked 2nd with an Elo of 1083, behind only the previous-generation Gemini 3.1 Flash Live
• Pricing: input audio costs $0.84 per hour, the lowest in its Speech-to-Speech index tier and roughly half the price of the previous-generation Gemini 3.1 Flash Live High (the original post used the phrasing "roughly")

Why it matters

• The data comes from third-party evaluator Artificial Analysis and spans five dimensions—latency, agent benchmarks, audio reasoning, human blind-preference testing, and cost—painting a fairly complete comparative picture of Gemini 3.8 Live
• The combination of low latency and low cost signals a further drop in the barrier to real-time voice agent applications, potentially intensifying competition with GPT-Live, Grok, and other voice models

2026-09-16 ~ 2026-09-16 · 6 related posts

Full story(2 episodes)→

• Episode 1: Google Launches Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking, Topping Speech Quality Index(2026-09-15, 21 posts)
• Episode 2: Gemini 3.8 Live Tops Voice Benchmarks at Lowest Price(2026-09-16, 6 posts)

• Gemini 3.8 Live debuts #2 in Speech Agent Arena with Elo 1083, 93.2% task success — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-09-16
• [source] Gemini 3.8 Live tops Tau Voice agentic benchmark at 68.6%, up from 37.7% — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-09-16
• Gemini 3.8 Live scores 97.7% on Big Bench Audio, second only to Qwen — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-09-16
• [source] Gemini 3.8 Live hits 1.18s Time to First Audio, 2.5x faster than its predecessor — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-09-16
• [source] Gemini 3.8 Live priced at $0.84/hour, cheapest speech model on the index — ArtificialAnlys · 2026-09-16

1 near-duplicate retellings: ArtificialAnlys