Voice-Light: A Full-Duplex Cascaded Voice Agent with Causal Turn-Taking and Speculative Generation
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
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.
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: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...
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 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.
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.