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
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:2607. 22635v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Target-oriented dialogue systems have demonstrated strong capabilities in completing user goals through interactive conversations.
By Xuzhao Geng, Haozhao Wang, Xuelian Li, Zhenyu Yang, Haonan Lu, Rui Zhang, Ruixuan Li
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
arXiv:2606. 09169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged to support both understanding and generation within a single framework.
By Lingyi Meng, Zecong Tang, Haoran Li, Tengju Ru, Zhejun Cui, Weitong Lian, Qi Kang, Hangshuo Cao, Yichen Zhu, Yechi Liu, Kaixuan Wang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Chunwei Wang, Yu Zhang, Bo Dai
arXiv:2609.13076v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Conversational voice agents have advanced significantly, offering increasingly natural human-machine interactions through both cascaded and end-to-en...
By Yi-Jen Shih, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Guan-Ting Lin, Kai-Wei Chang, Siddhant Arora, Shu-wen Yang, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Shinji Watanabe, Hung-yi Lee, David Harwath
IRWOZ 2.0 is a refined dialogue dataset for industrial human‑robot interaction, expanding to 390 dialogues across four domains—Assembly, Delivery, Position, and Relocation. The dataset was improved using large language models (Mistral and Claude‑3.5) for generation and quality refinement, including manual corrections and automated typo removal. Benchmark tests show a substantial boost in dialogue state‑tracking performance, with GPT‑2’s BLEU‑4 score rising from 0.1651 to 0.5604 compared to the original IRWOZ.
By Chen Li, Dimitrios Chrysostomou
arXiv:2609.22200v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM assistants and agentic systems log long multi-turn conversations. AI providers often scan these conversations for Personally Identifiable Informati...
By Kaiyuan Zhang, Chuan Wang, Joey Zhong, Paul Fryzel, Kyle Polley, Jerry Ma, Ninghui Li
The paper introduces ECHO, a paired diagnostic benchmark for evaluating Chinese real‑time spoken dialogue systems on turn‑taking. ECHO pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either Yield or Keep actions, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. Experiments on four speech systems reveal that three systems over‑yield, correctly keeping the floor on fewer than 13% of backchannels, while the fourth system shows a more balanced performance, illustrating that interruption‑only evaluation can overestimate turn‑taking reliability.
By Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan, Qingxiang Guo, Zhou Wang, Dawei Yang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
arXiv:2606. 12411v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern conversational agents condition on an ever-growing dialogue history at each turn, incurring redundant attention and encoding costs that grow with conversation length.
By Yeongseo Jung, Jaehyeok Kim, Eunseo Jung, Jiachuan Wang, Yongqi Zhang, Ka Chun Cheung, Simon See, Lei Chen
arXiv:2601. 07994v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly operate over long-form dialogues with frequent topic shifts.
By Nayoung Choi, Jonathan Zhang, Jinho D. Choi
arXiv:2607. 12085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating retail conversational agents requires methods beyond lexical-overlap metrics to assess intent alignment, factuality, helpfulness, clarity, tone, and overall response quality.
By Niranjan Kumar M, Balaji Nagarajan, Karthik Nair, Faysal Satter, Nithin Surendran