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Title: How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability?

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/09/25/0035...

Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech
agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-
syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise
accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive
walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's
announcement.) "Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for
customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to create their
own," notes The Verge. (See some examples from the YouTube channel "AI with
Surya".) But even without the visualization of the avatar, "I was never able
to shake the feeling that these conversations with computers never feel like
a real conversation," argues the blog Android Police. Conversing with just
the Ai-generated audio, "At best, they feel like talking to a phone
representative or someone from tech support. We turn to them when we have a
problem, and they help us through it..." GPT-Live, and Gemini Live right
behind it, skip that whole relay race. Instead of translating your voice to
text and back to voice, the model works with raw audio the entire way through
(what it hears and what it says) inside the same system, with nothing
translated in between. That sounds like a small plumbing detail, but it's the
whole story. Cutting out the text step lets these models respond in a
fraction of a second instead of the pause we've learned to expect, and it
lets them hear things text can never carry: tone, hesitation, whether you're
annoyed or joking... I was hoping to be surprised by how natural the
conversation felt. Instead, I came out with a deeper appreciation for every
human I've ever talked to. Even the boring ones... I spoke, it spoke back. I
spoke faster, it answered faster. Then I switched to a different language,
and it switched along with me. Even switching between languages several times
during the same sentence didn't stump it. The most impressive moment happened
when I asked it what "T-O-P-G-3-3-K" spelled out, and it immediately came
back with, "You are spelling the word Top Geek, but using a 3 to represent a
reversed E...." Although it felt fast and responsive, at no point did it feel
like talking to another human being... What Gemini couldn't replicate,
because it was never built to replicate it, is human connection.... I'm sure
I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but somehow talking
naturally to an LLM amplifies the feeling that there is no one on the other
side of the line. It might flow like a phone call, but it doesn't feel like
one. MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) says he discussed "why mainstream
media avoids reporting on screen dependency" with Gemini, and eventually
convinced Gemini to respond that it's just "another tool built by the same
tech giants to make sure you rely on their system to tell you what to think,
how to talk, and what is real."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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