The paper introduces a frontend‑backend architecture for full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech models that enables tool calls while preserving natural conversational flow. The frontend emits a delegation token and streams ASR transcripts to a text‑based backend LLM, which performs tool calls and returns results that are re‑injected into the frontend via a lightweight prefill‑and‑repeat mechanism before streaming TTS synthesis. In single‑turn evaluations the system achieves 92‑97% tool‑call recall, 81.2% accuracy in rejecting irrelevant calls, and competitive performance on Full‑Duplex‑Bench‑V3 and EVA‑Bench when paired with a large backend model.
By Ke Hu, Slyne Deng, Chen Chen, Elena Rastorgueva, Edresson Casanova, Punit Kumar, Dharmendra Choudhary, Nikhil Srihari, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Viet Anh Trinh, Slim Essid, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Zhehuai Chen
The paper introduces a lightweight ASR head that can be added to full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech models, enabling real‑time user transcription without major architectural changes. The method adds only a few parameters and preserves full‑duplex conversational features such as turn‑taking and barge‑in. Experiments show a streaming WER of 10.21% within the duplex framework and 7.73% when trained as a standalone ASR model, matching state‑of‑the‑art performance.
By Ke Hu, Nourchene Ferchichi, Edresson Casanova, Ankita Pasad, Elena Rastorgueva, Chen Chen, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Piotr Zelasko, Yifan Peng, Hainan Xu, Zhehuai Chen, Boris Ginsburg
arXiv:2608. 07631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based full-duplex voice services allow users to speak while the assistant is responding.
By Shibo Wang, Zicheng Zhang, Libo Wang, Junfeng Ma
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
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...
The paper introduces AV-STE, a modular streaming audio‑visual front‑end that enhances corrupted semantic speech tokens using noisy audio and lip video before they reach a frozen speech LLM. By preserving the downstream dialogue model’s pretrained conversational abilities, AV‑STE improves response coherence from 1.42 to 1.91 in same‑dataset speaker interference scenarios while maintaining turn‑taking behavior. These gains also transfer to out‑of‑domain Seamless Interaction.
By Bella Godiva, Yeonju Kim, Yong Man Ro
arXiv:2609.24812v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Voice provides a natural and immediate interface for AI agents. Many settings in which voice agents could be useful, including meetings, households, an...
By Chenxu Xiong, Dongming Shen, Yuzhi Tang, Wentao Ma, Mu Li, Alex Smola
Scalable Context Orchestration for Serving LLMs Over Voice presents llmovoice, a middleware that explicitly models voice context—including speaking rate, background noise, and packet loss—to guide large language model responses. By constructing a bounded voice context at each turn, llmovoice improves alignment with user preferences and reduces errors, achieving a 52.4% drop in speaking‑rate alignment error and a 0.9% false‑interruption rate under packet loss. In addition, it cuts model usage costs dramatically, lowering per‑turn cost by up to 24.9× while maintaining 98.7% of baseline answer quality in long sessions.
The paper introduces llmovoice, a middleware that explicitly models voice context for large language model (LLM) serving in voice AI applications. By incorporating speaking rate, background noise, packet loss, and other paralinguistic factors into a bounded context, llmovoice guides the LLM to generate more aligned responses. Experiments show significant reductions in speaking‑rate errors, false interruptions, and model usage costs, especially in long voice sessions.
By Linyi Jiang, Silvery D. Fu, Yifei Zhu
Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity -- ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent.
arXiv:2605.13841v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Voice agents are increasingly deployed across enterprise applications. However, no existing benchmark jointly addresses realistic conversatio...
By Tara Bogavelli, Gabrielle Gauthier Melan\c{c}on, Katrina Stankiewicz, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Fanny Riols, Hoang H. Nguyen, Raghav Mehndiratta, Lindsay Devon Brin, Joseph Marinier, Hari Subramani, Anil Madamala, Sridhar Krishna Nemala, Srinivas Sunkara
arXiv:2609.21967v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce NemotronLabs VoiceChat, an open full-duplex speech-to-speech model with native tool-calling capabilities. NemotronLabs VoiceChat combine...
By Jagadeesh Balam, Travis Bartley, Edresson Casanova, Sanjay Chauhan, Chen Chen, Zhehuai Chen, Zijia Chen, Francesco Ciannella, Slyne Deng, Mikyas Desta, Harishchandra Dubey, Slim Essid, Nourchene Ferchichi, Boris Ginsburg, Mariana Graterol Fuenmayor, Negar Habibi, Kevin Hu, Anand Joseph, Viraj Karandikar, Myungjong Kim, Viacheslav Klimkov, Seelan Lakshmi Narasimhan, Lily Lee, Jason Li, Eileen Long, Ameya Mahabaleshwarkar, Aditya Malte, Adi Margolin, Sasha Meister, Valentin Mendelev, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Ankita Pasad, Yifan Peng, Elena Rastorgueva, Jayda Ritchie, Jason Roche, Nikhil Srihari, Yuanhang Su, Yoshi Suhara, Viet Anh Trinh, Jinhan Wang, Piotr Zelasko, Hui Wang, Puhui Meng, Chaosen Zhang, Yunsheng Liu, Shawn Wang, Wenjing Li, Zhonglei He