TurnBench is a new multi‑domain benchmark for evaluating turn‑taking dynamics in spoken dialogue. It comprises a 30‑hour hand‑labeled corpus of dyadic human conversations, a standardized evaluation protocol for end‑of‑turn and interruption detection, and covers six distinct interaction styles with triple annotation. The benchmark also provides a 104‑hour training set, a public leaderboard, and an interactive dataset viewer at https://turnbench.sesame.com.
By Freeman Jiang, Ramon Sanabria, Soham Deshmukh, Bandhav Veluri, Simon Michael Vuch Williams, Elliott K. Suen, Garreth Lee, Kevin Yoonho Choi, Takuya Umeki, Riku Kubo, Sathvik Udupa, Chien-yu Huang, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Zhuoyan Tao, Satyapriya Krishna, Sefik Emre Eskimez, Yu Tsao, Hung-yi Lee, Shinji Watanabe
arXiv:2610.08683v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Full-duplex speech models are trained to converse with a person, but they are increasingly made to converse with each other, in self-play data generati...
By Lichen Zhu, Yueqian Lin, Yiheng Wang, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen
arXiv:2606. 11386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) enable seamless speech interaction by allowing models to listen and speak simultaneously, yet the internal mechanism by which they coordinate listening and speaking remains underexplored.
By Cheng-Kuang Chang, Kai-Wei Chang, Alexander H. Liu, James Glass
arXiv:2609.13117v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Full-duplex evaluation often emphasizes whether an agent keeps speaking or stops. That binary cannot express a third response humans use routinely: con...
By Yunqi Lu, Tyler Baumgartner, Nikhil Johri, Brandon Tai, Candice Fan, Luc Debaupte, Ruben Aguilar, Bill Wang, Yi Zhong
The paper introduces a pipeline that generates intent‑labeled, two‑channel conversational speech from relational event lists, enabling controlled synthesis of full‑duplex dialogue with 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin. By having an LLM author each event’s speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment, and then aligning and timing these events independently, the system produces diverse, realistic turn‑taking signals. Experiments show that models trained on this synthetic corpus achieve higher floor‑occupancy accuracy and better start‑speaking/listening F1 scores compared to models trained on prior data.
By Matthew Sun, Vinay Kothapally, Meng Yu, Chao Huang, Hao Zhang, Yixuan Zhang, Steve Yves
Full-duplex speech models require training data that preserves turn-taking, overlap, interruption, and backchannel behavior, yet these signals are entangled across speakers in noisy real-world recordi...
arXiv:2610.20172v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Full-duplex speech systems must decide when to enter, hold, or relinquish the conversational floor, even as multiple speakers overlap or backchannel...
By Puneet Mathur, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2606. 07547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs.
By Luoyuan Zhang, Bokai Xu, Junbo Cui, Weiyue Sun, Yingjing Xu, Hanyu Liu, Yuan Yao
SteerDuplex is a full‑duplex speech dialogue model that can be steered along attributes such as tone, persona, speaking rate, and voice style in response to user instructions. The authors introduce a taxonomy of text‑ and audio‑based steerability, identify gaps in existing models, and fine‑tune a Moshi‑based model with reinforcement learning to improve timing and response continuity. They also present SteerBench, a benchmark of 390 spoken prompts and 1,067 human‑authored rubrics, showing significant gains in audio‑steering pass rates and interruption handling compared to open baselines.
By Utkarsh Tyagi, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Advait Gosai, Sonal Kumar, Nikhil Barhate, Isabell Sagar, Steven Li, Miheer Bavare, Daniel Quigley, Fabiola Tapia Carrillo, Jose M Patron E, Diego Mac\'ias Guti\'errez, Paul Song, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Yunzhong He
arXiv:2606. 16568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable turn-taking is essential for spoken dialogue systems.
By Rutherford A. Patamia, Ming Liu, Wei Luo, Favour Ekong, Akan Cosgun
The article surveys multi‑turn conversational AI, highlighting its shift from isolated text prompts to sustained, multimodal interactions that involve clarifying goals, revising requests, and switching topics. It reviews literature across text‑only dialogue, AudioLLMs, multimodal and omni‑modal systems, and tool‑augmented agents, organizing findings around datasets, models, training, evaluation, and cross‑cutting challenges. The analysis reveals that while multimodal perception and action have progressed rapidly, systems still struggle with persistent memory, cross‑turn grounding, full‑duplex interaction, robust evaluation, and cultural alignment.
By Syeda Faiza Ahmed, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Firoj Alam, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
arXiv:2609.20995v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Natural spoken interaction requires more than streaming ASR, language generation, and speech synthesis: a system must react to overlap without cancel...
By Bertil Braun