Gemini 3.8 Flash
A fast, low-cost multimodal workhorse that keeps a full million-token window. Built for high-volume apps that still need image, audio and video understanding.
At a glance
Released
Aug 20, 2026
Provider
Google
Context window
1,000,000 tokens
Max output
64,000 tokens
Modalities
Text + image + audio + video → text
Knowledge cutoff
January 2026
API model ID
gemini-3.8-flashLicense
Proprietary (API only)
Pricing
Standard
Input$0.75 / 1M
Output$3.75 / 1M
Long-context requests are billed at $1.50 in / $7.50 out per 1M. A typical 1,500-token prompt with a 650-token answer costs ≈ $0.004 on the standard tier. Run your own prompt through the calculator →
What's new vs the previous model
Compared withGemini 3.5 Flash (April 2026)
- Faster responses and better instruction following
- Still trails the Pro and Argon tiers on the hardest reasoning
Best use cases
High-throughput extraction
Classifies and extracts fields from large batches of documents cheaply.
Chat and support
Powers responsive assistants that handle images and voice notes inline.
Media tagging
Captions and categorizes large libraries of images and short video.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Low latency
- Million-token context
- Strong price-to-capability ratio
Limitations
- Weaker on multi-step reasoning
- Shorter effective reasoning depth than Pro tiers
How to test it
- No-code: open gemini.google.com and pick Gemini 3.8 Flash from the model switcher — no API key needed.
- Playground: sign in to Google AI Studio and run prompts in the workbench, then copy the generated code.
- API: create a key in Google AI Studio and call the API (example below).
curl "https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-3.8-flash:generateContent?key=$GEMINI_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"contents": [{"parts": [{"text": "Explain tokenization in one paragraph."}]}]}'