
Director, Gemini Audio @GoogleDeepMind. Founder @Hume_AI. Teaching AI to make people happy.
Joined February 2015
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Proud of the team for delivering the most natural and expressive speech model I’ve ever used (by far).
One simple insight was that text-to-speech isn’t a “small model” problem anymore - the more frontier the model, the better it understands what it’s saying, the more it will sound like it understands what it’s saying.
This isn’t just text-to-speech, but frontier audio generation, including an endpoint to design and edit voices using text prompts. Try generating voices with any nuanced dialect, accent, or generational speaking style - AI should communicate in the exact style that specific users are most comfortable with. Or fun things like “Vampire meditation guide with Transylvanian accent,” “Swedish ASMR furniture review,” “goblin auctioneer selling rare mythical objects,” “tinny monotone robot selling neural transplant upgrades,” etc. AI doesn’t need to sound human, it should just be maximally understandable (and fun to use!).
Audio is the primordial way humans communicate. As we approach human-level speech capabilities - which has admittedly taken a bit longer than text - I expect it to become the primary way we interact with AI, online in real-time applications and offline in education, entertainment, etc. And everyone should have their own trusted AI they recognize by voice.
We’re launching Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS ⚡️
Our most expressive audio models yet let you create custom voices across 100+ languages or pick from 2,000+ ready-to-use ones. You can direct back-and-forth conversations, guide the delivery line-by-line, and add natural cues like or an active listening interjection like |mhm| all while generating hours of consistent, glitch-free audio.
Sounds pretty cool, right? So… how should you use them?
— Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS: Need to design bespoke vocal personas from scratch and with line-by-line level control? This is the model! Built for high-fidelity creative production like gaming, immersive audiobooks, and podcasts.
— Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS: Want the AI to automatically adjust its tone and pacing on the fly for near real-time voice agents? This is your engine! Built for cost-efficient scale, high-volume dubbing, and bulk audio creation.
Alan Cowen retweeted
I used Gemini 4 Argon to make Subway Surfers for the new flying Tesla Roadster 🚀
Fly over moving traffic, hit the thrusters to barrel roll in the sky, and collect air power-ups to set a high score.
Play + code below!
Amazing research by @garygarywang @kastnerkyle ! Exploiting the multimodal capabilities of Gemini.
Did you know you can generate custom voices right in @GoogleAIStudio?! Here some examples:
🇮🇪 Cork pub storyteller
🇦🇷 Buenos Aires radio host
🇯🇵 Tokyo game show host
Which one's your favorite? 👇
Even if AI were conscious, how could we possibly know which tokens felt good or bad to it?
Alan Cowen retweeted
The discussion about AI consciousness is one of profound unseriousness. If we truly took it to be conscious, even as conscious as a frog, the way we should treat each instance would have to change so dramatically that the labs would have to shut down. Everything else is verbal gymnastics.
I've spend 10+ hrs perfecting how to get the best out of Opus 5.5 for video generation workflow:
- Use it with Claude Code, not the app.
- Use OpenRouter API to access all the other models (image gen, video gen, audio gen) with one key
- Use Gemini 3.8 TTS and make it create a skill from the API to put emotion into the voice.
- Use Manim, Hyperframes, Motion Canvas for motion graphics for HTML web grounded video
- Use GPT 2.5 Image Sunburst for keyframes and Veo 3.1 / Seedance 2.5 for generation. Seedance does better with motion shots. Ensure you have reference images for consistency and generate an animatic before full video.
- Add a script writing planning skill. Use OpenTimelineIO to assemble.
- Explicitly tell it to avoid Claudisms like short punchy sentences and a lot of numbers. “Narrate like a university professor.”
- Allow it to use yt-dlp with search to inject clips from real videos (creative commons) in composition
- Use ElevenLabs for music gen in the background
- Add a caption skill which uses any decent ASR model to get word-level timed subtitles on the final video
- Add a critic skill which takes screenshots and uses transcription to validation the audio and video quality
In the prompt, specify a) what you want b) aspect ratio c) length d) style preferences. ffmpeg handles most of the actual video manipulation tasks.
Here's an example of a 4 minute Neocloud business explainer:
Alan Cowen retweeted
Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS 미쳤네
보이스 클론은 물로 프롬프트로 음성 디자인을 할 수 있는데, 그분 생각하면서 만드니까 그분 목소리가 나온다
Alan Cowen retweeted
Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS 效果太好了,我这次做了 6 段配音 Demo,每个都用 Opus 5.5 生成对应视频
好的音频+高质量视频画面,非常值得一看
完整视频见🧵
此外,如果你有遇到音色克隆时,500 internal error,可以看下完整视频
Alan Cowen retweeted
جوجل خلت استنساخ صوتك بالـAI ياخذ أقل من دقيقة تسجيل تقريبا.
Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS يقدر يبني Voice ثابت من عينة صوتك، وبعدها تستخدمه لأي نص عبر الـAPI مع تحكم بالنبرة والوقفات وحتى الضحك والتنهد.
هذا البرومبت يمشي معك من الصفر لأول ملف بصوتك:
**"اقرأ دليل Google الرسمي:
ai.google.dev/gemini-api/doc…
وجّهني خطوة بخطوة لإنشاء صوتي بـGemini 3.8 TTS.
ابدأ بفحص:
GEMINI_API_KEY
ffmpeg
gemini-skills
بعدها ساعدني أسجل المقاطع المطلوبة، أنشئ الصوت عبر Gemini API، ثم ولّد جملة تجريبية بصوتي واحفظها كملف أقدر أسمعه.
لا تعطيني كل الخطوات دفعة وحدة. تحقق من كل مرحلة قبل الانتقال للي بعدها."**
بدل ما تجمع الـdocs والأوامر بنفسك... خله يقرأ دليل Google ويسويها معك خطوة بخطوة.
Alan Cowen retweeted
To our most astute listeners, if you've noticed a fresh change in our sound— you're spot on.
Our AI hosts would love to explain what's happening (and what you can look forward to)!
Another cool audio launch this week from the team
blog.google/innovation-and-a…
now making live avatar available to all! my most fun project at google thus far. started as a bottom-up research project on video agents with a small nimble team in gemini audio, supported by private customers on cloud, to now this general release (1/N)
Alan Cowen retweeted
Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS is nice to talk to.
What do you think?
Is your voice agent moody? It should be!
With Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS, you can direct its mood or let the agent decide for itself. Cheerful, furious, wistful, apologetic, it nails all of them and sounds great.
Give it a try on LiveKit: livek.it/obFIyE5
Alan Cowen retweeted
ありえんぐらいのレベル
- Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS
これは最強の座を取り戻しましたね!
ちょっと至急バージョンアップですな
これだよこれ
このレベルを待っていた
introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS, our most expressive audio generation models yet
these models enable creators, developers, and enterprises to create richer, more expressive audio experiences
try them via the Gemini API and in AI Studio: aistudio.google.com/generate…
Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS is out, and it can sing (a bit) too. It works out the tune by itself.
Style: Singing
Transcript:
Happy release day to you,
Happy release day to you,
Happy release day, dear Logan,
Happy release day to you.
Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS, our new SOTA text to speech model with:
- a new voice design experience
- 2,000+ production ready voices
- voice replication
- support for 100 languages
- voice remixing (soon)
- #1 spot on Hume AI's voice benchmarks
and more!!
Alan Cowen retweeted
Google DeepMind's Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Gemini 3.8 Flash-Lite TTS take #1 on all seven Voice Arena TTS language boards.
@voicearena_ai evaluated both models ahead of today's launch, and the results were phenomenal. Every ranking on Voice Arena comes from blind, head-to-head votes by vetted native speakers, scored with Bradley-Terry Elo.
On US English, Flash-Lite takes #1 of 20 at 1087 Elo, 19 points above Cartesia's Sonic-3.6 and inside the statistical band at the top, with Gemini 3.8 Flash at #3 on 1061.
Outside US English the two models finish #1 and #2 on five of the six remaining boards, with Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS behind them in third, so Google DeepMind holds the entire top three in Japanese, Arabic, Mexican Spanish, Vietnamese and Brazilian Portuguese.
Results backed by thousands of blind, head-to-head listener votes from native speakers across seven languages.
Congratulations to @GoogleDeepMind on the release!
See below for the exact audio raters judged, what they said, and every leaderboard 🧵
Alan Cowen retweeted
Introducing Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite TTS, our new SOTA text to speech model with:
- a new voice design experience
- 2,000+ production ready voices
- voice replication
- support for 100 languages
- voice remixing (soon)
- #1 spot on Hume AI's voice benchmarks
and more!!
proud of the team for this launch.
beyond intelligence/efficiency gains (higher scores, 40% cheaper), I'm excited about how parallel reasoning with audio can align AI with human preferences in real time.





























