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. 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:2608.28630v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Compared with half-duplex dialogue systems where the system waits for user turn completion before it responds, natural full-duplex dialogue systems r...
By Tianrui Pan, Qinglin Zhang, Chong Deng, Luyao Cheng, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jie Tang, Gangshan Wu, Jie Liu
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: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:2609.13117v1 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
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...
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
DuplexDrama is a newly announced synthesized spoken dialogue dataset that uniquely combines complete persona and scenario settings, three full‑duplex behaviors (interruption, backchannel, incomplete), expressive speech with persona‑aligned emotion labels, and script‑aware sound events. The dataset was created through a four‑stage pipeline and validated for quality on both scripts and audio, yielding over 2,000 hours of audio featuring 64 voices across 13 personas and 5 age groups, with 3.8% of turns containing full‑duplex behaviors. A curated bilingual subset of 6,400 dialogues (800 hours total) will be released to support research in full‑duplex spoken dialogue models, and evaluation prompts will accompany the dataset.
By Qingxiang Guo, Wenke Fan, Shuofeng Zhao, Dawei Yang, Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Hongwei Cai, Zhou Wang, Weixu Wang, Lin Yang, Shuran Zhou, Yang Song
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
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