DuplexSpeechBench-Document Grounding (DSB‑DG) is a benchmark that evaluates how well voice agents can ground their responses in external documents across five professional domains. It focuses on three failure modes—Context Saturation, Grounding Decay, and Proactive Grounding—and includes 1,636 adversarially verified QA pairs from 50 documents. The benchmark measures grounding accuracy, hallucination, and response latency, revealing that cascaded pipelines achieve the highest accuracy while open‑weight systems suffer from abrupt capacity collapse and multi‑turn decay.
arXiv:2609.38867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) computer-use agents are typically evaluated with clean written instructions, despite speech being an increasingly popular in...
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...
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: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...
The paper introduces a frontend‑backend architecture for full‑duplex speech‑to‑speech models that enables tool calls while preserving natural conversational flow. The frontend emits a delegation token and streams ASR transcripts to a text‑based backend LLM, which performs tool calls and returns results that are re‑injected into the frontend via a lightweight prefill‑and‑repeat mechanism before streaming TTS synthesis. In single‑turn evaluations the system achieves 92‑97% tool‑call recall, 81.2% accuracy in rejecting irrelevant calls, and competitive performance on Full‑Duplex‑Bench‑V3 and EVA‑Bench when paired with a large backend model.
arXiv:2608. 07631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based full-duplex voice services allow users to speak while the assistant is responding.
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.
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.
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 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.
Natural interaction in digital and physical environments requires continuous perception and timely responses. Spoken dialogue relies on acoustic and linguistic cues, while video interaction also requi...
arXiv:2609.39446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing full-duplex speech benchmarks cover only subsets of real-time interaction behaviors, often under limited contextual conditions. We introduce D...