Full‑duplex speech models can listen and speak simultaneously, but they struggle to decide when to speak. Experiments with five model families show that being addressed or encountering silence are reliable triggers, whereas cues like false facts or hazards are not. Even when models answer questions, they rarely challenge false claims or warn about danger, revealing a gap in content understanding and intervention decisions.
By Linkai Peng, Baorian Nuchged, Kaiqi Fu, Yuyang Yao
Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.
arXiv:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
By Xinyi Liu, Hooshang Nayyeri, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Emine Yilmaz, JK Kim, Yifei Zhang, Charith Peris, Hari Thadakamalla
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
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 ContraTalk, a benchmark that tests whether dialogue models truly use acoustic cues or rely on transcript shortcuts. It formalizes cross‑modal disagreement, creates conflict and consistent QA examples, and proposes an Audio Twin representation to expose acoustic evidence to models. Experiments show that while text‑only LLMs perform well on consistent cases, they falter on conflict cases, and AudioLLMs only partially mitigate this issue.
By Yen-Ju Lu, Yuzhe Wang, Yaohan Guan, Xiluo He, Jiarui Hai, Mingrui Liang, Kaavya Chaparala, Thomas Thebaud, Laureano Moro-Velazquez, Najim Dehak, Jesus Villalba
arXiv:2608.29241v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Clinical voice agents are now deployed in routine care, where real patients do not wait their turn: they interrupt. These systems typically use a casca...
By Zachary Ellis, Spencer Hazel, Adam Brandt, Yajie Vera He, Ernest Lim, Jared Joselowitz
arXiv:2609.27372v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Benchmarks for full-duplex spoken dialogue models score turn-taking with binary fixed-window rules that reward immediate response or silence by compl...
By Kian Shamsaie, Iman Modarressi
DuplexSpeechBench-IFEval (DSB-IFEval) is a new benchmark that evaluates how full‑duplex voice agents follow implicit instructions during real‑time spoken interaction. It contains 1,038 test cases across eight assistant roles and tests five conditioning protocols, measuring floor management with an Instruction Adherence Score (IAS) and persona consistency with a Persona Adherence Score (PAS). Experiments on six speech systems reveal architecture‑dependent trade‑offs, showing that some models are more sensitive to explicit versus persona‑only instructions and that even when following conflicting directives, they struggle to override them under safety conflict.
By Puneet Mathur, Dinesh Manocha
arXiv:2609.13445v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speech-to-speech LLMs like Moshi, and its derivative PersonaPlex, can listen and speak concurrently through full-duplex generation. However, they can b...
By Kento Nishi
arXiv:2603. 19997v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the separation of literal interpretation from contextual inference in a collaborative block-building tasks, where an agent must resolve underspecified instructions using context.
By Natalia Bila, Kata Nasz\'adi, Alexandra Mayn, Christof Monz
VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.
By Ramit Pahwa, Parivesh Priye, Apoorva Beedu