Limits and specifications of the Live API

This page describes various limits and specifications for using the Live API and its models.

General specifications and limits

• Supported input and output: (for details, see media formats below)

  • Input: text, images (not PDFs), audio, video
  • Output: text (transcription) and audio (streaming)

• Supported tools: function calling, Grounding with Google Search, Grounding with Google Maps

• Knowledge cutoff date: January 2025

The Live API does not support generating structured output (like JSON) or the Count Tokens API.

Session-related limits

For the Live API, a session refers to a persistent connection where input and output are streamed continuously over a connection.

If the session exceeds any of the following limits, the connection is terminated. Note, though, the Live API provides some options (see below) to handle these session-related limits.

• Session context window is limited to 128k tokens.

  Due to this context window limit, here are the approximate maximum session lengths based on input modalities:

  • Audio-only input sessions are limited to 15 minutes.
  • Video + audio input are limited to 2 minutes.

• Connection length is limited to about 10 minutes.

  You'll receive a going away notification about 60 seconds before the connection ends.

Here are some options for handling session-related limits:

• Compress the session context window so that the server automatically maintains the context size within the limit.

• Resume a session to prevent losing conversation context during brief network disconnects or after receiving a going away notification.

Learn more about managing sessions.

Rate limits

The Live API has rate limits for both concurrent sessions per Firebase project as well as tokens per minute (TPM).

• Gemini Developer API:

  • Limits vary based on your project's Gemini Developer API "usage tier" (see their rate limits documentation)

• Agent Platform Gemini API (formerly Vertex AI):

  • 1,000 concurrent sessions per Firebase project
  • 4M tokens per minute

Media formats

The Live API supports the following types of media:

• Input: images, audio, video
• Output: audio

Image formats

The Live API supports the following for image input:

• Maximum images per prompt: 3,000

• Maximum file size per file (inline data): 7 MB

• Supported MIME types: image/png, image/jpeg, image/webp, image/heic, image/heif

Audio formats

The Live API supports the following audio formats:

• Input audio format: Raw 16 bit PCM audio at 16kHz little-endian

• Output audio format: Raw 16 bit PCM audio at 24kHz little-endian

• Supported MIME types: audio/x-aac, audio/flac, audio/mp3, audio/m4a, audio/mpeg, audio/mpga, audio/mp4, audio/ogg, audio/pcm, audio/wav, audio/webm

To convey the sample rate of input audio, set the MIME type of each audio-containing Blob to a value like audio/pcm;rate=16000.

Video formats

The Live API expects a sequence of discrete image frames and supports video frames input at 1 frame per second (FPS).

• Recommended input: native 768x768 resolution at 1 FPS.

• Supported MIME types: video/x-flv, video/quicktime, video/mpeg, video/mpegs, video/mpg, video/mp4, video/webm, video/wmv, video/3gpp

Note that this specification makes the Live API unsuitable for use cases that require analyzing fast-changing video, such as play-by-play in high-speed sports.

Response voices

The Live API supports 30 different synthisized HD voices, each with distinct characteristics. You can view a list of response voice options and hear demos of each voice by expanding the section below.

If you don't specify a response voice, the default is Puck.

Learn how to specify the response voice.

View a list of response voice options and hear demos

Voice name	Description	Gender	Demo
Achernar	Soft	Female
Achird	Friendly	Male
Algenib	Gravelly	Male
Algieba	Smooth	Male
Alnilam	Firm	Male
Aoede	Breezy	Female
Autonoe	Bright	Female
Callirrhoe	Easy-going	Female
Charon	Informative	Male
Despina	Smooth	Female
Enceladus	Breathy	Male
Erinome	Clear	Female
Fenrir	Excitable	Male
Gacrux	Mature	Female
Iapetus	Clear	Male
Kore	Firm	Female
Laomedeia	Upbeat	Female
Leda	Youthful	Female
Orus	Firm	Male
Puck	Upbeat	Male
Pulcherrima	Forward	Female
Rasalgethi	Informative	Male
Sadachbia	Lively	Male
Sadaltager	Knowledgeable	Male
Schedar	Even	Male
Sulafat	Warm	Female
Umbriel	Easy-going	Male
Vindemiatrix	Gentle	Female
Zephyr	Bright	Female
Zubenelgenubi	Casual	Male

Languages

The Live API supports the following languages. Learn how to influence the response language.

Languages supported by all audio-generating models

Language	BCP-47 Code	Language	BCP-47 Code
Arabic (Egyptian)	ar-EG	German (Germany)	de-DE
English (US)	en-US	Spanish (US)	es-US
French (France)	fr-FR	Hindi (India)	hi-IN
Indonesian (Indonesia)	id-ID	Italian (Italy)	it-IT
Japanese (Japan)	ja-JP	Korean (Korea)	ko-KR
Portuguese (Brazil)	pt-BR	Russian (Russia)	ru-RU
Dutch (Netherlands)	nl-NL	Polish (Poland)	pl-PL
Thai (Thailand)	th-TH	Turkish (Turkey)	tr-TR
Vietnamese (Vietnam)	vi-VN	Romanian (Romania)	ro-RO
Ukrainian (Ukraine)	uk-UA	Bengali (Bangladesh)	bn-BD
English (India)	en-IN & hi-IN bundle	Marathi (India)	mr-IN
Tamil (India)	ta-IN	Telugu (India)	te-IN

Additional languages supported by audio-generating 3.x models

Language	BCP-47 Code	Language	BCP-47 Code
Afrikaans	af	Filipino	fil
Albanian	sq	Finnish	fi
Amharic	am	Galician	gl
Armenian	hy	Georgian	ka
Azerbaijani	az	Greek	el
Basque	eu	Gujarati	gu
Belarusian	be	Haitian Creole	ht
Bulgarian	bg	Hebrew	he
Burmese	my	Hungarian	hu
Catalan	ca	Icelandic	is
Cebuano	ceb	Javanese	jv
Chinese, Mandarin	cmn	Kannada	kn
Croatian	hr	Konkani	kok
Czech	cs	Lao	lo
Danish	da	Latin	la
Estonian	et	Latvian	lv
Lithuanian	lt	Luxembourgish	lb
Macedonian	mk	Maithili	mai
Malagasy	mg	Malay	ms
Malayalam	ml	Mongolian	mn
Nepali	ne	Norwegian, Bokmål	nb
Norwegian, Nynorsk	nn	Odia	or
Pashto	ps	Persian	fa
Punjabi	pa	Serbian	sr
Sindhi	sd	Sinhala	si
Slovak	sk	Slovenian	sl
Swahili	sw	Swedish	sv
Urdu	ur