Google launches Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, voice-preserving real-time speech translation in 70+ languages
Confirmed
The takeaway
On 2026-06-09 Google released Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, an audio-to-audio model that translates speech continuously a few seconds behind the speaker while preserving their intonation, pacing and pitch.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra40 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen70 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.79 days after its cutoff
It is after the cutoff of GPT-6 Astra, Gemini 4 Hydrogen and Grok 4.7, and can be in the training data of Claude Opus 5.5.
Key facts
- Model id gemini-3.5-live-translate-preview; ~$0.0053/min audio in, ~$0.0315/min audio out
- 70+ languages auto-detected; 2,000+ language combinations in one meeting
- Continuous (not turn-by-turn) output, streamed in 100 ms chunks (press); SynthID watermark on outputs
- Model card ‘Gemini 3.5 Audio’ (dated 2026-08-26, also covers Transcribe/Transcribe Live): no numeric evals in the card; knowledge cutoff Jan 2025; no Frontier Safety Framework Tracked or Critical Capability Level reached; limitations include inconsistent voices and weak detection of non-native accents and rapid language switching
- Google Translate app gains a headphone ‘listening mode’; early testers include Grab, CJ ENM and LiveKit
What happened
Google introduced a dedicated live speech-translation model and rolled it into consumer (Translate), enterprise (Meet) and developer (Live API) surfaces at once.
Why it matters
Voice-preserving simultaneous interpretation moved from demos into products used by hundreds of millions of people, competing directly with OpenAI’s gpt-realtime-translate released a month earlier.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 4 primary
Primary
- Google - Fluid, natural voice translation with Gemini 3.5 Live Translateblog.google, official
- Gemini API model pageai.google.dev, docs
- Google DeepMind - Gemini 3.5 Audio model card (Live Translate, Transcribe, Transcribe Live)deepmind.google, official
- Google on X - developers can use Gemini 3.5 Live Translatex.com, official
Changes
- Read the Gemini 3.5 Audio model card; added its safety result and limitations
- Filed