Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking vs Cascade

Cascade is more reliable, by 30.5 points. Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking passed 43 of 82 scenarios on all three runs, and Cascade passed 68. A scenario only counts when every run of it passed.

On reliability, no: the cascade passes more scenarios on every run. Cascade is ahead on reliability, success rate, agent responses, data accuracy, calls where the agent went quiet and interruption, and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking on response time. Both ran as the same agent, with the same prompt and tools.

Cascade, by 9.7 points. Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking saved everything exactly right on 84.4% of the calls that save data, and Cascade on 94.1%. On Booking calls, 88.9% against 98.8%. On Medicare calls, 72.7% against 81.8%. A call counts only when nothing is missing, wrong, extra or saved twice.

Yes. Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking starts replying 0.10s sooner at the median. Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking takes 2.07s at the median and 2.74s at p90; Cascade takes 2.17s and 2.51s. Both are measured on the call audio, from the caller finishing to the agent starting to reply.

Cascade, by 0.01 on a 0 to 5 scale. Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking scores 4.95 and Cascade 4.96 for how well the agent handled being talked over.

Cascade, by 4.5 points. The agent went quiet for 10 seconds or more on 5.3% of Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking calls and 0.8% of Cascade calls.

There is no verified per-minute rate for Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking and Cascade, so cost cannot be compared yet.

Cekura ran both as the whole agent in the same open-source Pipecat pipeline, with the same prompt, tools and connection. A simulated caller worked through all 82 scenarios on live calls, three times each, 3,690 calls across the benchmark. A call passes only when the agent said the right things and saved the right data. The cascade runs the same agent for reference and is never ranked.