Gemini-3.5-live-translate-preview started having long audio and text translation delays on the Free tier

Gemini API
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Hi all,

We developed a solution to help the internationals in our community understand live events, lectures, sermons in their language, translating live speech into both translated audio and translated text captions. It’s in production and we have been using it for weeks now.

We started seeing that since August 25, 2026 the translation stopped behaving like a real-time service when using our Free-tier API project.

We’re seeing several versions of the same problem:

  • The first translated audio and text sometimes take a long time to appear.
  • Translation may begin normally and then stop while the person continues speaking.
  • Both the translated audio and translated text can fall far behind the live speech.
  • In some tests, the missing translation arrived more than a minute later. By then, the audio and captions no longer matched what was being said live.
  • Sometimes the source transcription also becomes delayed or stops updating.

We tested the Free and Paid API projects with the same application, audio, network, and Gemini configuration. The problem occurs with the Free-tier key, but we have not been able to reproduce it with the Paid-tier key.

During the delays, we confirmed that our application continues sending audio normally. There are no dropped audio chunks, network interruptions, or growing application queues. The Gemini WebSocket also remains connected, and we receive no 429, RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED, authentication error, disconnect, or other error.

This makes the problem difficult to detect because the connection appears healthy, but Gemini stops returning real-time translated audio and text.

For now, we have temporarily moved all sessions to our Paid-tier API project because the Free tier is not reliable enough for live translation.

Has anyone else started seeing this recently?

We would appreciate clarification on the following:

  1. Is this a known Free-tier issue with gemini-3.5-live-translate-preview?
  2. Can a Free-tier capacity or quota problem cause translated audio and text to stall while the WebSocket remains connected?
  3. Should Gemini return a 429, RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED, or another error when this happens?
  4. Is there a server message or diagnostic field we can use to detect that translation has stopped even though the connection is still open?

We can provide sanitized logs and configuration details if needed.