Google Expands Search Live to 200+ Countries with Multilingual Gemini 3.1 Flash Live

Google is expanding Search Live, its voice and camera-based AI search assistant, to more than 200 countries and territories with support for dozens of languages. The expansion is powered by Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, a new audio-focused model designed specifically for multilingual conversations.

What's Changing

Search Live, which rolled out broadly in the US last September, lets users point their phone's camera at objects or locations and ask questions via voice. The assistant returns audio responses alongside web links to relevant information. Users can access the feature by tapping the "Live" button beneath the search bar in the Google app (Android and iOS) or through Google Lens.

Google claims Gemini 3.1 Flash Live is "inherently multilingual" and delivers improvements over the previous version, including faster response times and what the company describes as "more natural and intuitive conversations."

Concurrent Updates

Google is simultaneously rolling out real-time translation to Google Translate on iOS, allowing users to capture speech and hear translations through headphones. This feature is expanding to Germany, Spain, France, Nigeria, Italy, the UK, Japan, Bangladesh, and Thailand.

What This Means

Google's expansion of Search Live to 200+ countries represents a significant push to make its conversational AI search capabilities globally accessible. By positioning Gemini 3.1 Flash Live as audio-first and multilingual, Google is attempting to differentiate its search experience from text-based competitors and address a core limitation of previous AI assistants—language support. The timing and scale of the rollout suggest Google views multimodal, voice-first search as a key battleground against OpenAI's SearchGPT and other emerging search alternatives. However, Google has not disclosed specific performance benchmarks or technical details about the model's multilingual capabilities, leaving open questions about how it compares to other multimodal systems on non-English languages.