EchoChain: A Full-Duplex Benchmark for State-Update Reasoning Under Interruptions

Real-time spoken dialogue systems must distinguish interruptions that require yielding the floor from backchannels that permit continued speaking. Existing benchmarks typically score events independently and may therefore assign high scores to systems with fixed action preferences rather than context-sensitive decision policies. We introduce ECHO, a paired diagnostic benchmark for Chinese turn-taking evaluation. ECHO pairs examples with the same overlap transcript but contrasting preceding multi-turn dialogue contexts, with one requiring Yield and the other Keep. It additionally includes off-talk examples for diagnosing unnecessary yielding. We introduce pair accuracy, which requires correct decisions on both members of a pair and assigns no credit to constant-action policies. Experiments on four speech systems show that three exhibit a severe over-yielding bias: they correctly keep the floor on fewer than 13% of backchannels, resulting in near-zero pairwise success rates equal or less than 4%. While the remaining system remains comparatively balanced across contexts, these findings broadly demonstrate that interruption-only evaluation can severely overestimate practical turn-taking reliability.

Real-time full-duplex speech models can listen while speaking, enabling natural interaction without rigid turn boundaries. Existing benchmarks evaluate turn-taking, interruption handling and multi-round dialogue, but largely centre on a designated user rather than an assistant participating in a shared conversation among several people. We introduce Duplex-MPE to evaluate when such an assistant should answer, remain silent or stop speaking. The benchmark contains 2,000 scenarios with three or four human speakers and one assistant, each paired across explicit and implicit addressing of the same request. Models receive continuous conversation audio without transcripts or supplied turn boundaries. Four scores measure fresh response initiation, answer accuracy, silence preservation and stopping when a human resolves a request. We evaluate five open-weight speech systems: MiniCPM-o 4.5, Moshi, FLM-Audio, Voila and Freeze-Omni. MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on three scored capabilities, while frequent speech from other systems can coexist with inaccurate answers or failures to remain silent. A transcript-based Gemini 3.1 Pro reference responds 64.3 percentage points more often to explicit than implicit requests; paired tests detect no significant response-rate difference for the speech systems.

Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.