Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations. We propose ModeratorLM, a role-playing voice agent that conditions turn-taking behavior on an explicitly assigned role in multi-party settings.
arXiv:2606. 13544v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking in multi-party spoken conversations remains a fundamental challenge for voice-based agents, particularly under dynamic floor competition and varying user expectations.
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...
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.
arXiv:2610.20172v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Full-duplex speech systems must decide when to enter, hold, or relinquish the conversational floor, even as multiple speakers overlap or backchannel...
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.
arXiv:2607. 01345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking naturalness is central to full-duplex spoken dialogue systems, yet its automatic evaluation remains limited.
SIT‑Eval is a framework that evaluates conversational agents by sampling diverse situations at each turn and judging responses against situational rules. It uses an LLM‑interlocutor to generate uniformly sampled contexts and a context‑aware LLM‑judge to assess rule compliance. Benchmarking eight large language models on 1,292 turns uncovered hidden failure modes, showing that models with similar overall scores can differ greatly in rule adherence, especially in ambiguity clarification and Socratic questioning.
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...
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...
arXiv:2603.26515v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient and robust turn-taking detection remains a significant challenge in industrial-grade voice AI agents. Existing systems often rely o...
The paper reviews the fragmented literature on real‑time voice agents, noting that architecture, turn‑taking, and agentic evaluation communities rarely cite each other. It presents three evidence‑based claims: (1) architecture choice is a deployment constraint rather than a definitive solution, (2) evaluation has shifted from component quality to grounded outcomes, and (3) the dyadic assumption is breaking down as multiparty turn‑taking and reasoning become essential. The authors propose the TRG reporting standard to characterize agents by timing, recovery, and state‑verified outcomes, with an optional fourth axis for multiparty contexts.