In our call testing, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live followed the system instruction of having a “British accent” pretty much all the time. Now with this new gemini live 3.8, I’ve noticed that it completely ignores this instruction and just continues with an American accent. I’ve tried multiple different prompts i.e. shorter, longer and it seems to ignore the accent request.
Hello @Ned_Cerneckis ,
DM’ed you for more details.
We too are noticing this, and can we please urge google QA team to start adding such tests to your QA test plans.
It is then speaking words even in British English accent like ROWTER (ROUTER)
So one of your tests must be to test pronunciations in an accent in a same lingual language.
What concerns me is 2.5 end of life 13th December. The 3.8 live speech side is way way better and incredibly more robust. The audio generation is also a step back, sounds not so expressive but also no matter what is done it switches between UK and US accents. I tried a Scottish accent and it went to an UK English, tried again then got a Scottish accent.
The problem also is you can’t switch off the audio tokens, forced to have them/pay for them whilst using a work around using a pure fast parallel tts option.
Any thoughts
I tried gemini live 3.8 with another vendors fast live streaming expressive TTS voice GB English and it was as fast as gemini 3.8 (native audio streaming) but importantly it stuck to GB English but then this breaks the AInAOut Model
I don’t want to switch or mix vendors so was a test. Many of us are committed to Google and mixing vendors complicates billing for us too.
I would say this is a P1 critical fix 48 hours, a lot of projects will be put on hold. I have 8 on my plate, and 3 massive ones and one delayed because of a data vendor (100’s of outlets).
I would say this is an immediate urgency and cannot be delayed.
thank you kindly for listening!