ECHO is a new paired diagnostic benchmark designed for Chinese full‑duplex spoken dialogue systems to evaluate context‑sensitive turn‑taking. It pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either a Yield or Keep decision, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. The benchmark introduces pair accuracy, penalizing constant‑action policies, and shows that many systems are biased toward Yield, performing better on interruptions than on backchannels.
By Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan, Qingxiang Guo, Dawei Yang, Zhou Wang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
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. 01345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking naturalness is central to full-duplex spoken dialogue systems, yet its automatic evaluation remains limited.
By Hao Zhang, Thomas Thebaud, Georgi Tinchev, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Laureano Moro-Velazquez
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
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
The paper proposes using semantic uncertainty, derived from large language models, to predict Transition Relevance Places (TRPs) in spoken dialogue. By sampling possible continuations of an ongoing turn and measuring changes in semantic dispersion, the authors identify moments when a listener might take the floor. Their method outperforms prompt-based and fine-tuned text-only baselines on a dataset with real-time TRP labels, supporting the idea that evolving semantic constraints inform turn‑taking opportunities in unscripted interaction.
By Muhammad Umair, Jan P. de Ruiter
arXiv:2607. 20460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current full-duplex (FD) spoken dialogue systems can produce fluid interactions, yet it remains unclear whether they can adapt their turn-taking behavior when explicitly instructed.
By Yuzhi Tang, Wentao Ma, Xiling Zhao, Ahmad Salimi, Sepehr Harfi Moridani, Dongming Shen, Jixuan Wang, Abdulrahman Abdulrazzag, Murdock Aubry, Yu-Hua Chen, Daniel Lee, Jaewon Lee, Jonah Mackey, Silin Meng, Nicholas Stranges, Chenxu Xiong, Hao Yu, Yi Zhu, Mu Li, Alex Smola
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
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
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: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:2607.26178v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Turn-taking is a central component of full-duplex interaction. Which turn-taking behaviors are appropriate varies with the scenario, yet current mo...
By Takyoung Kim, Kang-wook Kim, Sang Hoon Woo, Julia Hirschberg, Gunhee Kim, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur