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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.
The paper introduces ELLSA 2, an end‑to‑end full‑duplex dialogue model that jointly optimizes speech interaction and streaming gesture‑expression generation. It uses an autoregressive, chunk‑wise synthesizer that combines pretrained acoustic features with distinct listening and speaking hidden states, enabling continuous non‑verbal generation even when the model is silent. The authors also present contextual semantic calls and template guidance to separate the decision to invoke a semantic gesture from its realization, and they establish a curated data and evaluation pipeline for dialog‑aware co‑speech gesture generation, showing that ELLSA 2 outperforms cascaded baselines and that semantic template guidance significantly improves gesture quality.
arXiv:2610.34653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latency-sensitive spoken agents must know not only which tool to call, but also when they have heard enough to act. Waiting for the turn to complete de...
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.
arXiv:2607. 05365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech.
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...