Published 2 days ago • loading... • Updated 13 hours ago
Google’s New Gemini Live Avatars Want to Make Support Bots Feel More Human
Google announced Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar, an extension of last week's Gemini 3.8 Live release that gives the model a visible, animated presence during live conversations for enterprise use.
Designed for customer service and sales support, the avatars allow businesses to deploy custom personas from high-quality images. Shuo-yiin Chang, research scientist at Google DeepMind, and CJ Zheng, Gemini software engineer, noted the system supports 97 languages and background tool calls.
To ensure transparency, each avatar features a watermark using Google's SynthID. The company implemented these "strict safeguards designed to respect identity, and keep AI-generated content transparent," they said.
Researchers from Google Research and Google DeepMind have long warned about risks of Anthropomorphism in conversational agents. Experts note that Humanlikeness can foster false reliability, inflating user expectations and obscuring potential errors.
While companies move toward deployment, the industry continues grappling with hazards of empathy in AI systems. As AI-generated agents become common in sales and support roles, developers must balance natural communication with potential human interaction harms.