Gemini Live retirement: what changes for voice agents on 17 November
Google retires the Gemini API's preview Live and TTS models on 17 November 2026. Swapping in Gemini 3.8 Live is a one-line change; its new defaults for tool calls, silence and TTS prompts are not. Here is what changes, which date applies on which surface, and how to re-test each agent.
Speech-to-speech vs pipeline voice AI: choose per call, not per platform
Speech-to-speech and pipeline voice agents are no longer separated by latency. After eight days in which every pipeline stage gained a faster model and speech-to-speech systems stopped blocking on reasoning, the choice comes down to which guarantees a call needs. Here is what each path can't do, from running both in production, and a rule for choosing per call type.
Model migrations and sunsets: how a voice AI platform keeps running when the models change under it
The models behind voice agents change every few months — new versions ship, old ones get deprecated, capabilities move around. If your platform hard-codes a model, every one of those changes is an outage. Here's how a resilient voice AI platform absorbs model churn without breaking live agents.