Google Search Live switches to Gemini 3.8 Live and adds web links

Google moved Search Live to a new model called Gemini 3.8 Live on 15 September. Google announced it on its own blog, in a post by Tom Ouyang and Malini Jaganathan. Spoken answers in Search Live now come back with links to web pages.

Spoken answers now carry links a reader can open

Search Live is the part of the Google app where someone talks to the search engine and can point a camera at something. Until now the reply came back as speech. Rajan Patel, a vice-president at Google, says the replies now arrive with links to read further, according to Search Engine Land.

That matters to anyone who publishes. A spoken answer with no link is a dead end for a site. A spoken answer with a link is a referral, even a small one.

The model handles 97 languages in one conversation

Google says Gemini 3.8 Live supports 97 languages and lets a person change language in the middle of a conversation. It reads visual input close to real time. It can also run tools in the background without stopping the conversation.

Google published benchmark figures for the model. It gives 82.6 on a speech-to-speech quality score from Artificial Analysis, 68.6% task completion on a test called tau-Voice, and 97.7% on Big Bench Audio. These are Google’s own numbers.

A second model talks while it thinks

Google released a companion, Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, for harder jobs. It reasons and speaks at the same time and says things like it is checking something. It narrates progress through a multi-step task instead of going silent.

The company gave no pricing for either model.

Where the two models can be reached from 15 September

Developers get both through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. Businesses get a private preview in Gemini Enterprise. Ordinary users meet 3.8 Live in Search Live, and Pro and Ultra subscribers meet it in the Gemini app.

The open question is how big those links turn out to be. Google has said that Search Console cannot report a useful position for AI search, so nobody can yet see where a site sits inside a spoken answer. Google has also been feeding more of its own data into answers, as it did when it put WeatherNext 3 forecasts into Search, Maps and Gemini.

The next reporting release from Google is the thing to watch. If referral data from Search Live never appears in Search Console, a link inside a spoken answer will stay invisible to the site that earned it.