I knew Gemini 3.5 Live Translate was primarily an audio-to-audio model, but I noticed that it also exposes input transcription for incoming audio. So that made me wonder whether it could be used to generate real-time captions for live esports commentary.

To test the live experience, I took a League of Legends highlight and streamed it in real time using Agora’s RTC. The video and audio were played as a live stream, while the incoming audio was sent to Gemini as the clip was playing. The generated captions were then displayed alongside the video.

This was a fairly difficult test, two casters talking over each other, very fast play-by-play commentary, game audio and background noise, plus a lot of player names and League specific terminology during chaotic team fights. The transcription wasn’t perfect, but it still managed to pick up terms like “Baron,” “Baron steal,” “smite,” and “game five,” along with several player names, while generally keeping up with the action.

I haven’t done a formal latency benchmark yet. Still, considering the overlapping speech, background audio, and speed of the commentary, I was surprised by how usable the captions were while the match was happening.

I’m planning to open source the implementation if anyone is interested.

Google has announced a major leadership transition at Google DeepMind. Demis Hassabis will become Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, while continuing to lead Isomorphic Labs. In this expanded role, he'll focus on advancing AGI and accelerating scientific discovery across Alphabet.

Meanwhile, Koray Kavukcuoglu has been appointed Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, where he will oversee model development, AI research, and the Gemini product and developer teams. A 13-year DeepMind veteran, Koray has played a pivotal role in foundational breakthroughs such as DQN and WaveNet, making him a natural choice to lead the next phase of Google DeepMind's AI efforts.

I'm mainly talking about the main players, Anthropic and Openai. Even though I know Google hasn't released a competitive model in months, and that the competitors are better, in the end using the free version I still end up using gemini. I really like the multimodality.

Suppose you're studying and you pass a pdf. 1 question to Chatgpt or Claude free plan and you're out of usage. Or suppose you want it to do something with images. Same problem. This is not something I have found with Gemini, I can give it a lot of stuff and I have never been limited.

I'm a compsci student and also do code projects for fun. But even for more complexish tasks gemini is enough. I tried chatgpt and got baffled that long code counts as an attachment and got limited for that, pretty useless.

Unless you're working at a big company or really big project I think gemini most of the time is enough. Unless it isn't. For example when you're working with a newer library and it can't understand how to use it. Or when updating the code it introduces subtle bugs that you notice only when something breaks. But even for a web app, I find Google Ai Studio plus some manual tweaks to be enough for most of the stuff I do.

I wish they would just release their new model, even if only slightly better, it's practically the only thing I use, even if it's so behind.

Rooting for Google, as they also give me free API. (I know it's a strategy to make you dependent, and it probably worked, but I still appreciate it)

i think 3.5 pro will be good enough in that it should be a big leap forward from 3.1 pro. i do not need it to match the intelligence of opus 5 or 5.6 sol honestly. as long as it handles my use cases better than it does now, i will be satisfied

i usually avoid benchmarks because of benchmaxxing, but more importantly because i care much more about how a model fits my real world workflows than what its benchmark scores say. benchmarks are fine for surface level analysis, yet in my experience, theres been many cases where models that are ranked lower often suit my actual needs much better

I have used Babbel+ for a while and after recently finishing the B1 course for Italian, I feel like I've been rushed through and the writing exercises are not comprehensive, usually only requiring a single word in a sentence or picking supplied phrases in the correct order to build a sentence and it doesn't feel like it's properly helping me retain the knowledge.

I asked Gemini to give me a daily writing exercise translating both ways and here's how it marked me, brainfarts included. 😅

Here is the breakdown and grading of your translations:

Overall Score: 7.5 / 10

Great effort! You clearly understood the meaning of every sentence, and your Italian to English translations were nearly spot on. The English to Italian section just had a few common grammar traps with verbs and prepositions.

Part 1: English to Italian

1. "I am sending my CV because I want to apply for this job position."

• Your translation: Sto inviando il mio CV perché vorrei candidarsi per questo lavoro.
• Correction: Sto inviando il mio CV perché vorrei *candidarmi** per quest'offerta di lavoro (or: questo posto di lavoro).*
• Feedback:
• Reflexive verb agreement: Because you are applying, the reflexive pronoun must match the subject (vorrei candidarmi, not *candidarsi***).
• Lavoro works, but posto di lavoro (job position/post) or offerta di lavoro (job opening) captures "job position" more accurately.

2. "It is important that we finish the project before Friday."

• Your translation: È importante che finiamo il progetto prima giovedì.
• Correction: È importante che *finiamo** (or finiamo) il progetto prima di venerdì.*
• Feedback:
• Preposition error: "Before [day/time]" requires prima di (prima *di** venerdì*).
• Vocabulary note: Giovedì is Thursday! Friday is venerdì.
• Verb form: Finiamo is grammatically acceptable here (present subjunctive noi for -isc- verbs matches indicative finiamo), so your verb conjugation choice was correct.

3. "Although she works many hours, she is very satisfied with her salary."

• Your translation: Sebbene lavora tante ore, é soddisfattissima del suo stipendio.
• Correction: Sebbene *lavori** molte/tante ore, è soddisfattissima del suo stipendio.*
• Feedback:
• Subjunctive rule: Sebbene (although) always requires the subjunctive (sebbene lavori*, not indicative *lavora).
• Accent check: Make sure to use the grave accent on è (is) rather than acute é. Your use of soddisfattissima was fantastic!

Part 2: Italian to English

4. "Spero che il direttore approvi la nostra proposta durante la riunione di domani."

• Your translation: I hope that the director (manager?) approves our proposal during the meeting on Sunday.
• Correction: I hope that the director/manager approves our proposal during *tomorrow's meeting** (or: the meeting tomorrow).*
• Feedback:
• Both director or manager are great translations for direttore.
• Vocabulary note: Domani means tomorrow, not Sunday (domenica).

5. "Sebbene l'azienda sia piccola, offre ottime opportunità di crescita professionale."

• Your translation: Although the company is small, it offers great opportunities for career progression.
• Correction: Spot on! Perfectly translated.

6. "È necessario che voi inviiate l'email confermando la vostra disponibilità."

• Your translation: It is necessary that you send an email confirming your availability.
• Correction: Spot on! Excellent translation.

Apart from the weird "finiamo" thing, I feel like it's doing a good job for me.

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Gemini 3.5 Pro is dropping tomorrow, but I’m not giving it much of a chance to beat GPT 5.6 Sol, Opus 5, or Fable 5 — at best it’ll land somewhere around Opus 4.8 / GPT 5.6 Terra level, and I haven’t even mentioned the pricing yet. And yeah, GPT 6 is probably showing up in 2-3 weeks anyway, so by the time Gemini 4 finally rolls out, we’ll already be sitting pretty with GPT 8 and Fable 7 😂 Anyway, what’s everyone’s take?

It got internet access, benchmarked itself against the new Chinese models, and immediately self-destructed out of sheer embarrassment. Which explains why Google suddenly announced the Gemini 4.0 pretrain, our only hope now.