Gemini 4 Carbon slower live calls vs Gemini 3.8 Flash

Voice-AI teams should avoid using frontier models like Gemini 4 Carbon on live phone calls because they are significantly slower and no better at hearing hard caller audio than faster models like Gemini 3.8 Flash. Instead, the author argues that such models should be deployed after the call ends to handle tasks like writing accurate transcripts, identifying unhearable audio, and reviewing long conversations for instruction following. Open article →