arXiv Computation and Language

People Making Conversation: Evaluating How Naturally Speech Models Converse

arXiv AI
Sep 21

NemotronLabs VoiceChat: An Open Full-duplex Speech-to-Speech Model with Tool Calling Capabilities

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
arXiv AI
Sep 25

A Harness for Synthesizing Diverse Naturalistic Full-Duplex Conversations

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 AI
Sep 4

DuplexSpeechBench-IFEval: Evaluating Implicit Instruction Following in Full-Duplex Voice Agents

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 Computer Vision
Sep 15

Realtime-Venus: A full-duplex interaction system with asynchronous delegation

arXiv:2609.13814v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural interaction in digital and physical environments requires continuous perception and timely responses. Spoken dialogue relies on acoustic and li...

By Ruixiang Zhao, Hualei Wang, Renhe Sun, Enzhi Zhou, Jincenzi Wu, Xujie Song, Kexin Shi, Zihang Liu, Pengcheng Zhu, Jiayi Zhou, Baoyue Zhang, Changhao Zhang, Zitong Wang, Jinhong Wang, Tong Niu, Jingjing Liu, Junan Lin, Haolin He, Hengshuo Chu, Yuhui Chen, Jian Liu, Yuge Huang, Junliang Xing, Yuntao Wang, Weiqiang Wang, Chun Yu, Yuanchun Shi
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Scalable Context Orchestration for Serving LLMs Over Voice

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

TurnBench: A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Turn-Taking Dynamics in Spoken Dialogue

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 AI
Sep 11

RelayS2S: A Dual-Path Speculative Generation for Real-Time Dialogue

RelayS2S is a hybrid real‑time dialogue system that runs a fast duplex speech‑to‑speech path and a slow ASR‑to‑LLM path in parallel. The fast path speculatively drafts a short response prefix and streams it to TTS, while the slow path generates a higher‑quality continuation conditioned on that prefix. A lightweight verifier decides whether to commit the prefix or fall back to the cascaded pipeline, achieving much lower latency (81 ms P90 first‑chunk) while preserving 99% of the cascaded pipeline’s textual quality.

By Long Mai, Junli Liang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Full-Duplex Speech Models Take the Floor When Asked, Not When Needed

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
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Liberating LLM Capabilities in Full-Duplex Speech Models

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