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Overview

gemini-3-flash-audio is Google’s Gemini 3 Flash Preview tuned for audio understanding, not transcription. It listens to a clip and answers free-form questions about how it sounds — speaker emotion, music style, ambient SFX, language, mood, pacing. It’s the part of audio that a transcript loses. Pair it with whisper-v3-turbo and you have full audio context for any clip.

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Specs

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Pricing

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Use this when

  • The question is about how something sounds, not what was said: mood, emotion, music style, ambient SFX.
  • You need to know what language is being spoken (and want a reasoned answer, not just a code).
  • You’re triaging audio for a video pipeline and want a one-sentence scene description per clip.

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Pick something else when

  • You only need the words: use whisper-v3-turbo — it’s cheaper and faster.
  • You need real-time audio (sub-100ms latency) — Gemini 3 Flash audio is fast but not real-time.

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Example

The endpoint is sync — the response includes the model’s answer plus a billing block. See endpoint reference for all parameters.

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Tips

  • Be specific in the question. “What’s the mood?” works, but “Is the speaker frustrated, neutral, or pleased? One word, then a one-sentence justification” gets a more useful answer.
  • Pass duration_sec when you have it (ffprobe gives you it in one line). Saves over-charging on high-bitrate inputs where size-based estimation runs long.
  • Audio scene first, transcript second. A 1-sentence audio summary often gives an agent enough context to decide whether the transcript is even worth fetching.

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Aliases that resolve here

  • audio-understand — the canonical alias for “ask a question about audio”. Resolves to this SKU today.
If you want stable behavior across alias changes, pin gemini-3-flash-audio directly.

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See also