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.
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.
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.
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:2603.16783v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust voice agents require exposure to the full diversity of how people interact through speech. However, obtaining enough spoken interactions is...
Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech. However, standard speech and text benchmarks do not capture whether these systems behave naturally in conversations, where timing, turn-taking, prosody, interpersonal stance, language and dialect consistency, and relationship-aware appropriateness jointly shape perceived quality.
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.
arXiv:2607. 05365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech.
arXiv:2609.09628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inferring speaker relationships from spoken conversations is an important step towards socially aware speech understanding. However, this task remain...