Neither Silence nor Overlap Is Failure: Intent-Conditioned Evaluation of Turn-Taking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Models
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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:2607. 01345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turn-taking naturalness is central to full-duplex spoken dialogue systems, yet its automatic evaluation remains limited.
The paper introduces ECHO, a paired diagnostic benchmark for evaluating Chinese real‑time spoken dialogue systems on turn‑taking. ECHO pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either Yield or Keep actions, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. Experiments on four speech systems reveal that three systems over‑yield, correctly keeping the floor on fewer than 13% of backchannels, while the fourth system shows a more balanced performance, illustrating that interruption‑only evaluation can overestimate turn‑taking reliability.
The paper introduces a pipeline that generates intent‑labeled, two‑channel conversational speech from relational event lists, enabling controlled synthesis of full‑duplex dialogue with 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin. By having an LLM author each event’s speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment, and then aligning and timing these events independently, the system produces diverse, realistic turn‑taking signals. Experiments show that models trained on this synthetic corpus achieve higher floor‑occupancy accuracy and better start‑speaking/listening F1 scores compared to models trained on prior data.
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.
ECHO is a new paired diagnostic benchmark designed for Chinese full‑duplex spoken dialogue systems to evaluate context‑sensitive turn‑taking. It pairs examples that share the same overlap transcript but differ in preceding multi‑turn context, requiring either a Yield or Keep decision, and also includes off‑talk cases to test unnecessary yielding. The benchmark introduces pair accuracy, penalizing constant‑action policies, and shows that many systems are biased toward Yield, performing better on interruptions than on backchannels.