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:2609.27372v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Benchmarks for full-duplex spoken dialogue models score turn-taking with binary fixed-window rules that reward immediate response or silence by compl...
By Kian Shamsaie, Iman Modarressi
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...
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...
By Puneet Mathur, Dinesh Manocha
PERSIST is a persistent memory system designed for multi-session, multi-speaker spoken dialogue, explicitly modeling Who, What, and When to enable voice assistants to recall past conversations and adapt to individual users. It structures cross-session histories into readable event records and retrieves them using a 3W joint scoring mechanism that combines semantic content, acoustic speaker identity, and temporal state. By reusing intermediate representations from the dialogue backbone, PERSIST reduces retrieval latency from 578.42 ms to 7.03 ms and achieves 85.08% end‑to‑end task accuracy on the SpokenTrace benchmark, improving EM@3 from 49.01% to 82.10%.
By Achira Lin, Siyuan Hou, Wenyi Yu, Xinnian Zhao, Haoyu Niu, Wang Geng, Longshuai Xiao, Shihai Xiao, Mangsuo Zhao, Chao Zhang
The study evaluates conversational speech models by placing them at 427 pauses and 482 turn ends from 176 unscripted conversations, scoring their responses on timing, latency, length, wording, and recall of recent dialogue. Hosted APIs (GPT Realtime, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, Grok Voice) respond at almost every pause, with latency ranging from 1–4 s for silence-based endpointers and about 8 s for semantic turn detection, while full‑duplex models (PersonaPlex, Moshi) remain silent more often and can interrupt within human reaction time. Recall rates vary: hosted systems remember 41–60 % of facts under a Claude Opus 5.5 judge and 19–26 % with a strict word matcher; full‑duplex models recall 17–22 % and 12–15 % respectively.
By Arya Bastani, Iman Modarressi