StepAudio 3 Realtime Technical Report

Real-time voice assistants must reason over evolving requests, execute actions, and follow conversational rules. Qwen-Audio-3.1-Realtime brings these requirements together through Think, Act, and Speak and Coordinate. Think combines Core-Cocktail supervised fine-tuning with Multimodality and Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (M$^{2}$-OPD) to transfer language capabilities and develop native audio skills. Act uses self-evolving executable environments and multi-granularity rollouts for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), teaching the model to use tools, interpret feedback, and complete tasks. Speak and Coordinate aligns whether, when, and how the assistant speaks or acts. We evaluate audio reasoning, multilingual understanding, tool use, conversational behavior, full-duplex interaction, and safety. Compared with Qwen-Audio-3.0-Realtime, 3.1 raises overall task success from 78.4% to 82.0% on our half-duplex speech-to-text adaptation of $τ$-Voice. On speech-to-speech Full-Duplex-Bench v1.5, the response rate to background speech falls from 73.0% to 13.0%. We also present a separate Voice Harness prototype, using Qwen-Audio-3.0-Realtime as its foreground, that extends spoken interaction to persistent tasks through foreground--background coordination and memory.

We introduce Full-Duplex-Bench-v3 (FDB-v3), a benchmark for evaluating spoken language models under naturalistic speech conditions and multi-step tool use. Unlike prior work, our dataset consists entirely of real human audio annotated for five disfluency categories, paired with scenarios requiring chained API calls across four task domains. We evaluate six model configurations -- GPT-Realtime, Gemini Live 2.5, Gemini Live 3.1, Grok, Ultravox v0.7, and a traditional Cascaded pipeline (Whisper$\rightarrow$GPT-4o$\rightarrow$TTS) -- across accuracy, latency, and turn-taking dimensions. GPT-Realtime leads on Pass@1 (0.600) and interruption avoidance (13.5%); Gemini Live 3.1 achieves the fastest latency (4.25s) but the lowest turn-take rate (78.0%); and the Cascaded baseline, despite a perfect turn-take rate, incurs the highest latency (10.12s). Across all systems, self-correction handling and multi-step reasoning under hard scenarios remain the most consistent failure modes.

Audio is an inherently interactive modality, yet today's Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are offline, and streaming audio models each handle only a single task such as streaming ASR or voice chatting. It is time to unify them into one online LALM: a model that, through an always-on perceive-decide-respond loop, listens to sound, environment, and instructions in real time and reacts on the fly. We formalize this regime as the Audio Interaction Model, and realize it with Audio-Interaction, a unified streaming model that retains offline task execution while adding online general audio instruction following, from dialogue to full voice chatting, deciding when to respond from the semantics of the stream. To enable this, we propose SoundFlow, a framework that instantiates the perceive-decide-respond loop end to end, from data to training to deployment, through streaming-native data construction, comprehension-aware training, and asynchronous low-latency inference for stable real-time interaction. We further construct StreamAudio-2M, a 2.6M-item streaming corpus spanning 7 fundamental abilities and 28 sub-tasks, and Proactive-Sound-Bench for evaluating proactive audio intervention. Across 8 benchmarks, Audio-Interaction preserves competitive performance on mainstream audio tasks while unlocking capabilities inaccessible to offline LALMs, including real-time ASR, streaming audio instruction following, and proactive help.