Google has expanded the capabilities of its Gemini 3.8 Live voice dialogue model with a new feature called Live Avatar. The technology allows you to create both animated cartoon characters and realistic digital copies of people who synchronize facial expressions and lip movements with AI-generated language in real time.
Google has expanded the capabilities of its Gemini 3.8 Live voice dialogue model with a new feature called Live Avatar. The technology allows you to create both animated cartoon characters and realistic digital copies of people who synchronize facial expressions and lip movements with AI-generated language in real time.
Google DeepMind developers Shuo-yin Chang and software engineer CJ Zheng noted in their blog that communication is inherently multimodal: it requires hearing, vision, facial expressions, and voice, The Register writes .
Avatars support communication in 97 languages. The feature is aimed at corporate customers (Gemini Enterprise). It can be used to automate service, for example, for checking guests into hotels or providing information.
Live Avatar is able to make system queries in the background and extract necessary information from databases right during the conversation. Companies can use both a ready-made library of characters and upload their own custom avatars.
Despite the technological breakthrough, the introduction of "humanized" Avars is causing debate even within the tech giant itself. Five years ago, DeepMind scientists published a study on the ethical and social risks of language models, where they specifically highlighted the danger of anthropomorphization - giving a program human features, words, or appearance.
Researchers have warned that when AI looks and speaks like a human, it creates a false sense of trustworthiness, empathy, and rational thinking in users, leading to overconfidence and distorted expectations.
Despite warnings from its own research team, Google has decided to roll out Live Avatar to enterprise customers. The company says the system was built with strict security measures in place.
"We developed Live Avatar with strict safeguards designed to respect individual privacy and maintain transparency about the fact that the content is generated by artificial intelligence," the project authors emphasized.
