Google Gemini Live gets its 'biggest update ever' with 5 new upgrades – here's how to try them (www.techradar.com)

Google has rolled out its biggest update yet to Gemini Live — the real‑time conversational interface — on Android and iOS, introducing five upgrades that make spoken exchanges more expressive and adaptive. The changes focus on prosody: Gemini Live can now modulate intonation, rhythm and pitch to speak faster or slower, adopt calmer tones in stressful contexts, and deliver dramatized storytelling with character accents (cowboy, cockney, etc.). Google highlights use cases like personalized tutoring, language practice, interactive quizzes, and simulated interviews, positioning the update as a step toward more natural, nuanced human‑AI conversation. For the AI/ML community this signals advances in controllable speech synthesis and prosody modeling: fine‑grained control over voice parameters (tempo, pitch contours, emotional valence) enables context‑aware responses and tailored pedagogy. Practically, developers and researchers should expect improvements in adaptive tutoring algorithms, multimodal alignment between text and expressive audio, and new evaluation needs for naturalness, safety, and accent fidelity. Accent imitation and expressive voice control also raise governance and ethical considerations — e.g., consent, misuse, and cultural sensitivity — that teams will need to address as expressive voice agents become more prevalent.