Spoken Dialogue Systems

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23 papers in the last four weeks, up 156% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 93

Oct 6, 2026cs.RO

Towards an Extensible Benchmark for Spoken Dialogue with Social Robots

Language models provide a plug-and-play interface between humans and robots, but important challenges remain when speech, dialogue, fast interaction, and collaboration are required. We propose a benchmark for the community to use as a way to explore common spoken dialogue artifacts between robots and humans, including requests for clarification, interruptions, embodied signals (e.g., head nods or facial cues), and time constraints. We also explain our vision to extend the benchmark for other aspects of human-robot interaction that are important to the larger research community. To facilitate the benchmark, we further propose using \textit{Retico}, a real-time communication framework that fulfills important technical requirements to enable robots to have spoken dialogue capabilities.

Casey Kennington, Ross Mead, Saad Elbeleidy +1

Department of Computer Science Boise State University Boise, Idaho, U.S.A. · Semio Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. · Peerbots Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A. +1

Spoken Dialogue Systems Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Human-Robot Interaction Social Robotics

Sep 30, 2026cs.CL

Mixture of Decoders for Diverse Dialog Response Generation

Mixture modeling is a long established machine learning technique for learning large sets of multi-modal data. While it is known that sequence-to-sequence models for dialog response generation suffer from the problem of low diversity, we hypothesize that it is because sequence-to-sequence models tend to learn a degenerate uni-modal distribution of responses. We then propose to incorporate a mixture of decoders into sequence-to-sequence models and try to make each decoder learn specialized topics in order to improve the diversity of generated responses. Our model is developed under the framework of conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). We evaluate our approach on an open domain chat corpus and show improvement over strong baselines in quantitative measures and human evaluation.

Wenchao Du

Microsoft Corporation Redmond, WA 98052

Spoken Dialogue Systems Diverse Text Generation Conditional Generative Modeling

Sep 30, 2026cs.HC

Richard: Voice-First Mobile Interaction for Persistent Tasks

Mobile terminals need to provide application and network services while supporting users' control over their attention. We explore voice-first interaction organized around requests and delegated tasks, allowing users to leave a conversation and later inspect, revise, and retrieve the work. We present Richard, a system prototype that manages voice sessions, task execution, and result delivery separately, linking them through persistent request records. Conversation and task views provide visual feedback, while the backend coordinates immediate responses, dedicated service operations, and agent tasks. Request revisions, execution states, and notifications remain associated with the relevant task. We examine this design through Android functional records, controlled lifecycle verification, and execution records of a real programming request. Controlled verification reproduces revision, execution after confirmation, and result retention; deployed-service records show backend progress and failure feedback after client disconnection. These observations inform the design of task continuity, user control, and service integration in mobile voice interaction, providing an implementation basis for personal computing devices that accommodate intermittent user participation.

Xinyang Chen

Spoken Dialogue Systems Conversational Agents Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems Personal AI Agents

Sep 29, 2026eess.AS

Voices as Handles: Reasoning about Speaker Identity with Frozen Text LLMs

Multi-user voice agents must track who said what across dialogue sessions. Text LLMs are attractive backbones for such agents, but transcripts alone do not expose acoustic speaker identity, leaving the model without a persistent reference for linking information to speakers across sessions. We address this gap by introducing Speaker Handles, soft-token representations that expose acoustic speaker identity to a frozen text LLM for cross-session speaker-dependent reasoning. A three-stage curriculum trains a lightweight projector, with fewer than 0.1% of the backbone's parameters, to map speaker embeddings into these handles. Establishing whether the resulting handles truly support cross-session speaker-dependent reasoning is challenging with existing benchmarks because textual cues can partially reveal fact ownership. We therefore present SpeakerBind, a controlled shared-agent benchmark in which overlapping facts across users require correct cross-session speaker attribution. Speaker Handles achieve 97.40-98.36% accuracy on VoxCeleb1 and 70.40% on SpeakerBind, close to the 71.88% topline. These results show that the proposed Speaker Handles provide an efficient way to integrate acoustic speaker identity into frozen text LLMs for speaker-content reasoning.

Runqiu Xu, Zhisheng Zheng, David Harwath

The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Spoken Dialogue Systems

Sep 29, 2026cs.CL

MultiTalk: Scaling Full-Duplex Speech Models to Long, Multi-Party, Bilingual Conversation

End-to-end full-duplex speech models have brought open-source machine conversation closer to human-like interaction, yet existing systems remain limited in two intertwined dimensions: long-context robustness and multi-party interaction. Real-world scenarios such as meetings, group lessons, and social-robot reception require a single model to track, contextualize, and respond to multiple speakers over extended durations. Progress is constrained by both data and evaluation: open multi-party speech corpora remain small and are not designed for codec-frame-level full-duplex modeling, while existing long-audio benchmarks focus on passive listening and speech-to-speech benchmarks are mostly short and dyadic. We extend the Moshi paradigm jointly along the long-horizon and multi-party axes in English and Chinese. First, we release 57.6k hours of synthetic training data (

[MultiTalkPT](https://huggingface.co/datasets/MultiTalk/MultiTalkPT)

and

[MultiTalkFT](https://huggingface.co/datasets/MultiTalk/MultiTalkFT)

) for long-form, multi-party, English-Chinese full-duplex dialogue, with controllable length, participant count, turn-taking, overlap, backchannels, interruptions, addressee shifts, and long-range coreference. Second, we introduce

[MultiTalkBench](https://huggingface.co/datasets/MultiTalk/MultiTalkBench)

, built from real human recordings, for evaluating long-form, multi-party, bilingual full-duplex dialogue. Conversations average 32.6 minutes and include probes for long-range entity tracking, topic coherence, and addressee selection. Third, we train a bilingual Moshi-style model that sustains coherent multi-party English-Chinese conversations over extended durations and substantially outperforms open-source baselines including Moshi, MiniCPM-o-4.5, and Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct on MultiTalkBench.

Ke Wang, Houxing Ren, Zimu Lu +4

CUHK MMLab · CPII under InnoHK

Spoken Dialogue Systems Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Speech Language Models Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems

Sep 28, 2026cs.CL

Almost Human, Except When It Matters: VoxParity and the Decisions a Voice Should Change

A voice agent can handle almost every call on the words alone and still fail the few its sector's rules were written for. Emergency-call standards, fraud guidance, radio phraseology and vulnerability rules recognise that how a caller sounds, or what else is audible, can change the right action. VoxParity tests whether agents act on it. In 183 scenarios from 14 sectors, one transcript stays fixed while the audio changes (a coaching voice, a medical monitor beeping, a mayday under a radio check, noise over a drug name, a child's voice placing a bet, a frightened whisper), and with it the correct typed tool call. A words-only null test credits a system only if hearing the call moves its actions more than it moves a pipeline that only reads the words. Only 11 of the 23 systems that can also be run on the transcript pass. Descriptively, errors run toward the words: when the audio calls for protection, all 28 systems carry out the routine request more often than they over-react on clean calls (41% against 12% pooled; the words-only pipeline, 58% against 15%). Exploratory analyses place most of the leading systems' misses on cues they heard; systems beat the null almost entirely on items that state the rule; the leading systems overrule heard resignation or confusion far more often than acute alarm; and, in the models tested, describing the voice and stating the rule each recover part of the shortfall, leaving a gap on emotion.

Bhavik Mangla

Independent Research

Spoken Dialogue Systems Audio Reasoning Agent Evaluation Tool Use

Sep 27, 2026cs.CL

Lost with a Map: Conversational State and Behavioral Reliability in Language Models

Task-oriented dialogue requires maintaining and updating information across turns, yet language models expose no explicit belief-state object. We study how conversational state is represented, updated, and used inside eight instruction-tuned language models from four families on MultiWOZ and SGD. Structure and values separate: which domains, slots, and requests are active is linearly readable just before the model acts, whereas exact values are far more readable where the user stated them. After a user changes a value, both values remain accessible at their mentions, and causal interventions show that both continue to influence the model's action. In natural closed-loop interaction, query failures separate into cases of weak structural support, incorrect value resolution, and failure to deploy otherwise-supported constraints, with targeted interventions producing systematically different repair behavior across these cases. These findings motivate a state-action controller that starts from the base model action and selectively edits it using structural readouts, without requiring a complete predicted belief state as an intermediate representation. On held-out MultiWOZ interaction across five models, it raises the base model exact-query accuracy from .318 to .621 and task success from .272 to .371 at negligible added cost. Overall, reliable interaction requires not only retaining conversational information, but resolving which available constraints currently apply and ensuring that they govern action.

Atahan Dokme, Larry Heck

Georgia Institute of Technology

Spoken Dialogue Systems LLM Reliability Belief Updating in LLMs Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Sep 27, 2026cs.CL

Context Spanning: A Communication Framework for Full-Duplex Speech Models and External LLM Backends

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models can listen and speak simultaneously like the real-time dynamics of human conversation. For natural dialogue, the ability to search for external information in real-time is also an important capability. Many models remain trapped in parametric knowledge, leaving them unable to access real-time information and tool execution. Furthermore, even when Large Language Models (LLM) retrieve information, many duplex speech models process it within a compressed latent space rather than in its raw text form, which can lead to information loss from compression. To address this issue, we propose Context Spanning, a framework for information injection between a full-duplex speech model and an external LLM backend via real-time chunked prefill. The injected frame is encoded in a single forward pass inside the real-time frame budget. It feeds the retrieved information to the speech model as-is, enabling it to reason over the information independently and generate responses. With this approach, our model achieves high performance on Full-Duplex benchmarks and strong results on Question Answering tasks, demonstrating its conversation potential. Context Spanning shows that external information can be injected directly into a duplex speech model, introducing a new simple and powerful mechanism for duplex systems.

Seonghyeon Go, Yongwoo Kim, Hyeonjin Cha +1

Mindlogic

Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Language Models Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems

Sep 24, 2026cs.CL

Controlling Backchannels in Streamable Full-duplex Models

Backchannels, brief acknowledgements like "uh-huh" produced while the other party may still be talking, are central to natural conversation, but full-duplex spoken dialogue models rarely model them explicitly. We introduce a lightweight backchannel head that predicts, from a full-duplex model's own hidden states, when a backchannel should begin. Once this probability crosses a tunable threshold, a backchannel is force-decoded. Attached to both a 7B (PersonaPlex) and a 1B (F-Actor) model, it generalizes across scale. Probing confirms the hidden states anticipate real human timing, and generation evaluation shows more frequent, better-timed backchannels. Human raters judge the resulting backchannels on par with real ones.

Maike Züfle, Peter Polák, Sefik Emre Eskimez +3

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany · AppTek, Germany · Charles University, Czech Republic +2

Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Language Models Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems

Sep 24, 2026cs.SD

AdaptDuplex: from static to adaptive full-duplex spoken dialogue

Full-duplex spoken dialogue requires simultaneous listening and speaking at sub-second latency, under conversational timing and cognitive demands that change moment to moment. Yet current models mostly impose static operating points, lacking a systematic mechanism for adaptive decisions. We present AdaptDuplex, which extends Qwen3-Omni with such a mechanism, co-designed across three layers. A compact token-level protocol represents every window as a canonical sequence, trains dual-stream alignment through a bounded text lead over speech, and exposes every behavioral decision as an explicit token for training-free runtime control via logits bias. Adaptive mechanisms dynamically predict among discrete window durations and augment direct response as needed with non-blocking cognitive consolidation and multi-flight external reasoning. A progressive pipeline introduces these behaviors through a three-stage Thinker curriculum, then Talker-only and joint SFT, with GRPO as a preliminary increment. On Full-Duplex-Bench v1 and v1.5, AdaptDuplex outperforms DuplexOmni on 18 of 21 comparable turn-taking, overlap-behavior, and timing metrics and MiniCPM-o 4.5 on 19 of 22, with gains in both interaction decisions and response timing. On human-recorded HumDial-FDBench, it attains the top Final score (69.6) of the compared duplex models.

Zhiyang Zhou, Yingxin Shang, Zhou Wang +9

Zuoyebang Education Technology

Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Language Models Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 23, 2026eess.AS

A Harness for Synthesizing Diverse Naturalistic Full-Duplex Conversations

Full-duplex dialogue systems, which listen while speaking, must distinguish a completed turn from a pause within a turn and an interruption that requests a turn from a brief acknowledgment or speech addressed to a third party. Yet existing conversational corpora provide limited control over these events and limited labels for their intent. We present a pipeline for synthesizing intent-labeled, two-channel conversational speech from relational event lists. An LLM authors each event's speaker, text, conversational act, and attachment to an earlier event without predicting absolute timestamps. Events are synthesized independently, aligned with their source text, and placed on a shared clock, so turn-taking landmarks are measured from the rendered signal while silence durations are specified or sampled from turn-taking distributions. The pipeline covers 42 phenomena across eight families in English and Mandarin, derives frame-level system actions from authored intent, and promotes diversity using small, diverse sets of prior examples and batch prompts that request alternatives with self-reported probabilities. Ablations show gains in each targeted diversity dimension. On a four-action label space for taking, holding, releasing, and not holding the conversational floor, a semantic voice-activity detector using only current and past audio reaches start-speaking and start-listening F1 scores of 0.819 and 0.802. When generating its own responses, the full-duplex speech model Moshi takes 0.85 of the reference turns after fine-tuning on the generated corpus, compared with 0.44 before fine-tuning. Its frame-level precision for predicting system-floor occupancy rises from 0.46 to 0.88. With reference context at each step, its frame-level floor F1 rises from 0.893 to 0.962. These results show that controlled synthesis can provide learnable and transferable supervision for full-duplex turn management.

Matthew Sun, Vinay Kothapally, Meng Yu +4

Tencent Americas, Palo Alto, CA, USA · Tencent Americas, Bellevue, WA, USA · School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

Spoken Dialogue Systems Synthetic Data Generation Speech Language Models Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 22, 2026cs.CL

Spoken Language Models that Think Aloud

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the capability of language models, directly applying it to Spoken Language Models (SLMs) may introduce long silent intervals under the serial "think-then-speak" paradigm, disrupting real-time spoken interaction. To address this issue, we propose an asynchronous think-aloud framework for reasoning-based SLMs within the Thinker-Talker architecture. The framework maintains a primary reasoning stream for logical deduction and a lightweight think-aloud stream that generates short, task-grounded progress utterances conditioned on the user input and the evolving reasoning state. A dynamic balance strategy coordinates the two streams at runtime, triggering additional think-aloud speech to avoid silent gaps and canceling pending utterances when the final response becomes ready. Experiments on spoken reasoning and question-answering benchmarks show that our approach substantially reduces user-audible silence during reasoning while maintaining answer accuracy comparable to that of a serial "think-then-speak" baseline, demonstrating the potential of asynchronous think-aloud for responsive interaction in SLMs.

Junyi Ao, Kainan Peng, Mingbo Ma +10

Meta Superintelligence Labs · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Work done at Meta

Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Language Models

Sep 21, 2026cs.CL

MSI-Bench: Evaluating Multi-Speaker Voice Interaction for Collaborative AI Agents

Voice provides a natural and immediate interface for AI agents. Many settings in which voice agents could be useful, including meetings, households, and collaborative work, are inherently multi-speaker. Supporting these settings introduces challenges that are largely absent from one-on-one interaction. We introduce the Multi-Speaker Interaction Benchmark (MSI-Bench) for evaluating multi-speaker voice interaction. Each test case is a short multi-party multi-turn audio scene with participant context, expected tool calls, and atomic rubrics. The benchmark targets three capability families: multi-speaker memory, multi-speaker instruction following, and multi-speaker reasoning. It comprises 1,152 test cases, evenly split between Mandarin Chinese and English (576 each). The strongest configuration on each split passes all rubrics on only 66.8% of English and 54.5% of Mandarin cases, and the strongest open-weight configuration on 34.0% and 19.3%. Failure analysis separates perception from reasoning: open-weight models are bottlenecked by the multi-speaker audio front-end, while frontier systems still fail speaker-scoped decision making on clean transcripts---and models across the board often respond when no one has addressed them. These results identify speaker-grounded perception, speaker-scoped decision making, and conversational restraint as concrete targets for future voice agents.

Chenxu Xiong, Dongming Shen, Yuzhi Tang +3

Boson AI Santa Clara, CA 95054

Audio-Language Model Evaluation Voice Agent Evaluation Spoken Dialogue Systems AI Agent Benchmarks Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation

Sep 17, 2026cs.CL

Full-Duplex Speech Models Take the Floor When Asked, Not When Needed

Full-duplex speech models listen and speak at once, promising always-on assistants. Yet they must also decide when they should speak. Human listeners speak when addressed or when the speaker stops, but also self-select to correct a false claim, supply a missing word, or warn of danger. We ask whether full-duplex models do the same. To separate the reason to speak from the opportunity, we construct context-matched English monologues in which only the trigger utterance varies within a topic, define 10 conditions from turn-allocation rules, and compress inter-word pauses to limit opportunities created by silence. Across five model families, being addressed and silence are far more reliable triggers than false facts or hazards. Frame-level text-token probabilities in Moshi and PersonaPlex are lower for false facts than for Neutral when averaged over the first 2,s after trigger end. Pauses or permission to interrupt do not close this gap either. Given the floor, Moshi and PersonaPlex answer most direct questions, yet the proportion of non-empty false-fact replies that challenge the claim is only .14--.15, and the proportion of hazard replies that warn of danger is .04--.07. This paper thus identifies a gap in both speech initiation and response content. Closing it requires genuine content understanding and intervention decisions grounded in it.

Linkai Peng, Baorian Nuchged, Kaiqi Fu +1

University of Connecticut · The University of Texas at Austin · X Square Robot +1

Language Model Safety Evaluation Spoken Dialogue Systems Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 16, 2026cs.CL

A frontend-backend architecture for tool calls in full-duplex speech models

Full-duplex speech-to-speech (S2S) models provide natural, low-latency conversational interaction and would benefit from the ability to use external tools and complete voice-agent tasks. We propose a frontend-backend architecture where a duplex speech-to-text frontend learns to emit a delegation token and forwards streaming ASR transcripts to a text-based backend LLM for tool calls. Tool-call results from the backend are injected back into the frontend through a lightweight prefill-and-repeat mechanism and then synthesized using streaming TTS to the user. Our approach largely preserves regular duplex turn-taking, interruption handling, and low-latency interaction as it requires minimal modifications to the frontend model. In a single-turn tool-call evaluation, our system achieves 92-97% tool-call recall, competitive tool-call prediction performance, and 81.2% accuracy in rejecting irrelevant calls. When equipped with a larger backend (e.g., Qwen3-235B-A22B), our system achieves competitive results on Full-Duplex-Bench-V3 compared to open and closed source models, and significantly outperforms GPT-realtime-mini and Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct on EVA-Bench. These results demonstrate that backend delegation is an effective and modular approach for combining natural duplex speech interaction with strong agentic tool-call capabilities.

Ke Hu, Slyne Deng, Chen Chen +10

NVIDIA, USA

Spoken Dialogue Systems LLM Tool Use Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems

Sep 15, 2026cs.CL

Same Words, Different Actions: Paired Turn-Taking Evaluation under Rewritten Dialogue Contexts

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.

Shuofeng Zhao, Hongwei Cai, Wenke Fan +9

Zuoyebang Education Technology, Beijing, China

Spoken Dialogue Systems Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Turn-Taking Prediction Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 15, 2026cs.CL

RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialogue

Speech-to-speech dialogue models increasingly support persona control, yet existing spoken role-playing benchmarks remain largely character-centric and short-horizon. This leaves open whether spoken dialogue models can sustain diverse roles over extended interactions, especially beyond predefined fictional characters. We introduce RoleBreak, an open benchmark for long-horizon role-playing robustness in spoken dialogue. RoleBreak contains 310 character-based and user-centered roles, 6,688 human-verified dialogue turns, and 11,743 fine-grained evaluation criteria, with 1,856 turns carrying expressive emotion targets for evaluating vocal emotion. Its scenarios are designed to stress role consistency, interaction quality, safety, and affect over extended conversations. We evaluate nine configurations spanning full-duplex, omni-modal, and cascaded ASR--LLM--TTS paradigms. We find four key patterns. First, current systems are substantially stronger at semantic role adherence than at vocal emotion. Second, semantic robustness remains brittle over long interactions: even the strongest evaluated system encounters its first persona and safety failures after only 10.4 and 11.6 turns on average. Third, scaling the LLM substantially improves semantic robustness and delays failure, but yields little improvement in vocal emotion. Finally, user vocal emotion affects role-playing behavior even when linguistic content is fixed. These findings highlight persistent gaps in both long-horizon robustness and vocal expressiveness in spoken role-playing systems.

Yuqi Wang, Fengyuan Liu, Haochen Luo +2

The University of Hong Kong · Kami AI

Large Language Model-Based Role-Play Simulation Speech Generation Evaluation Spoken Dialogue Systems Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Language Model Robustness Emotion-Aware Dialogue Generation

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

ER-EDF: A Psychology-Grounded Emotion Regulation Framework for Speech Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Audio-Language Models

Empathetic response generation in spoken dialogue systems requires both accurate emotion perception and appropriate emotion regulation. Grounded in psychological theories such as the Perception-Action Model and emotion regulation theory, effective empathy depends not only on inferring a user's affective state but also on regulating how it is expressed in responses. However, recent large audio-language models (LALMs) largely treat emotion as a direct conditioning signal, lacking explicit regulatory mechanisms, which often leads to affect mirroring rather than calibrated support. We propose ER-EDF, a psychology-grounded framework that explicitly decouples emotion perception and emotion regulation in LALMs. Perception tracks the user's emotional state, while regulation determines how this state should guide empathetic response generation. The framework is model-agnostic and integrates seamlessly into existing LALMs. We further construct a spoken empathetic dialogue dataset and introduce empathy-aware evaluation metrics beyond lexical matching. Experiments across five LALMs and two datasets show that ER-EDF consistently improves empathetic response quality in both automatic and human evaluations, highlighting the importance of jointly modeling emotion perception and regulation in spoken empathetic dialogue systems, paving a new direction for psychologically grounded empathetic AI.

Hongyu Jin, Wenda Zhang, Runqiu Fei +3

Spoken Dialogue Systems Audio-Language Models Emotion-Aware Dialogue Generation

Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

SteerDuplex: Steerable Duplex Speech Dialogue Models

Full-duplex spoken dialogue models support low-latency turn taking, interruption handling, and backchanneling, yet a key capability remains underexplored: steerability, the ability to reliably shift conversational behavior along attributes such as tone, persona, speaking rate, and voice style in response to user instructions. We introduce a taxonomy of text- and audio-based steerability that identifies substantial gaps in current full-duplex models. To address this gap, we introduce SteerDuplex, a Moshi-based full-duplex speech model fine-tuned on natural conversations and synthetic dialogues targeting instruction following, vocal delivery, reasoning, and duplex interaction. We further apply two-stage reinforcement learning (RL) with hybrid rewards, combining verifiable interaction checks and judge-based semantic feedback to improve timing and response continuity. To evaluate full-duplex spoken steerability, we introduce SteerBench, a benchmark with 390 spoken prompts and 1,067 human-authored binary audio and text rubrics spanning tone, persona, style/accent, and speed/length. On SteerBench, supervised training improves audio-steering average pass rate by 44.5 percentage points over the strongest evaluated open baseline. On Audio MultiChallenge, task average pass rate improves by 7 points over its strongest evaluated open baseline. RL further raises source-clean interruption response from 72.5% to 82.5% and reduces synthetic pause barge-in from 26.5% to 9%. Steering and aggregate task scores remain comparable or higher, while reward probes reveal reward hacking through incomplete responses. Our model and benchmark support systematic research on spoken steerability, with reward analysis showing why timing gains must be evaluated alongside response completeness.

Utkarsh Tyagi, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Advait Gosai +13

Scale AI · University of Maryland

Language Model Steering Spoken Dialogue Systems Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems

Sep 14, 2026eess.AS

MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant

Conversational voice agents have advanced significantly, offering increasingly natural human-machine interactions through both cascaded and end-to-end architectures. However, while recent benchmarks extensively evaluate dyadic interactions and passive audio comprehension, they largely overlook a prevalent real-world scenario: multi-party conversations. Evaluating agents in these settings is fundamentally more challenging than in dyadic interactions due to the exponentially greater conversational complexity. For voice agents to integrate seamlessly into human group dynamics, they must not only generate contextually appropriate responses but also demonstrate a nuanced understanding of open turn-taking. To address this gap, we introduce Multiparty Bench (MP-Bench), the first benchmark specifically designed to objectively evaluate conversational speech systems as active participants within multi-party contexts. MP-Bench assesses agent behavior along two primary dimensions: turn-taking awareness and response appropriateness. Additionally, we incorporate comprehension-based question-answering tasks as a complementary evaluation. By benchmarking 12 voice agents, we find that real-time voice agents stay at or below 22% on multiparty comprehension and remain near chance on multiparty turn-taking, exposing an open challenge for real-time voice agents under multiparty scenario.

Yi-Jen Shih, Shih-Yun Shan Kuan, Guan-Ting Lin +7

The University of Texas at Austin · National Taiwan University · Massachusetts Institute of Technology +2

Spoken Dialogue Systems AI Agent Benchmarks

Sep 11, 2026cs.CL

DuplexDrama: A Synthesized Dialogue Dataset with Scenarios, Full-Duplex Behaviors, Expressive Speech, and Sound Events

We present DuplexDrama, the first synthesized spoken dialogue dataset that simultaneously covers four dimensions: (i) complete persona and scenario settings; (ii) three full-duplex behaviors (interruption, backchannel, incomplete); (iii) expressive speech with persona-aligned emotion labels; and (iv) script-aware sound events. DuplexDrama is built via a 4-stage pipeline; quality validation on both scripts and synthesized audio confirms its quality. We have produced more than 2,000 hours audio data with a 64-voice timbre pool spanning 13 personas and 5 age buckets; 3.8% of all turns carry at least one full-duplex behavior. This data has been validated through internal full-duplex model training. We will release a curated subset of 6,400 bilingual dialogues (800 h, Chinese ~500 h + English ~300 h) to advance full-duplex spoken dialogue model research. Data samples are available at our demo page and LLM-judge evaluation prompts will be released with the dataset.

Qingxiang Guo, Wenke Fan, Shuofeng Zhao +9

Zuoyebang Education Technology, Beijing, China

Spoken Dialogue Systems Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 11, 2026cs.CL

Using Semantic Uncertainty to Estimate Transition Relevance in Turn-taking

Turn-taking is a fundamental mechanism that governs when interlocutors speak and listen. Although Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) exploit a range of linguistic, acoustic, and non-verbal cues, they produce ill-timed responses in unscripted interaction. A central challenge is anticipating Transition Relevance Places (TRPs), or opportunities, not obligations, for a listener to take the floor. Human listeners do not wait for turn endings; as an utterance unfolds, they use expectations about its developing meaning to anticipate TRPs and decide whether to take the floor. We examine whether these evolving expectations can be modeled through semantic uncertainty -- an LLM-derived measure of how strongly a turn so far constrains what may plausibly come next. To do so, we sample possible continuations of an ongoing turn and use changes in semantic dispersion to identify TRPs within turns. We evaluate this account on a dataset with TRP labels derived from real-time listener responses, rather than retrospective annotation. Our approach substantially outperforms prompt-based and fine-tuned text-only baselines, providing empirical support for the view that evolving semantic constraints inform perceived turn-taking opportunities in unscripted interaction.

Muhammad Umair, Jan P. de Ruiter

Department of Computer Science Tufts University Medford, Massachusetts, USA

Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking Prediction Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

$S^3$ -Bench: Evaluating Speech Interaction Models as Scientific Voice Assistants

The advance of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the paradigm of human-computer interaction, especially speech interaction models capable of seamless conversations. Despite remarkable performance as general voice assistants, their performance in specialized domains remains underexplored, particularly in scientific areas. Scientific interactions introduce formidable challenges, involving rare technical terminology, spoken norms of abbreviations, and the natural verbalization of symbolic special expressions. In this paper, we introduce S

^3

-Bench, a systematic evaluation framework covering 10 major disciplines, consisting of a Knowledge set for speech question-answering and a Dialogue set for multi-turn progressive interactions with simulated user agents. By decomposing a complete atomic turn into stages of speech recognition, perception, knowledge utilization with reasoning, and response pronunciation, we systematically characterize the common challenges and performance tradeoffs of existing approaches. Furthermore, experiments on multi-turn interactions reveal persistent limitations in user adaptation and the generation of accurate, comprehensive, and efficient responses.

Heyang Liu, Jiayi Huang, Wenyang Xiao +8

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Ant Group · Tongji University

Audio QA Spoken Dialogue Systems Multimodal Large Language Models Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluation

Sep 7, 2026cs.AI

An Auditable Symbolic-RAG-Generative AI Architecture for Goal-Oriented Conversation Orchestration

Goal-oriented conversational systems must answer factual questions, understand visitor-provided information, and advance business objectives without becoming rigid questionnaires. This paper proposes a Symbolic-RAG-Generative architecture centered on the Goal-oriented Retrieval-Augmented Conversation Engine (GRACE). An instruction-constrained Business Goal Compiler transforms business intent into an immutable objective set, normalized priority vector, canonical questions, and initial state vector. At runtime, GRACE receives the complete conversation history, latest visitor message, current state, and grounded answer generated by a separate RAG component. It updates completion only from visitor-authored evidence and selects one contextually modulated follow-up. The core policy maximizes expected business progress subject to a minimum visitor-utility constraint. We formalize the state, monotonic transitions, source separation, question modulation, and constrained policy; present the reference architecture; and define an evaluation comprising 24 English real-estate and 10 Spanish professional-cleaning conversations, totaling 119 protocol-defined visitor turns. Across both domains, GRACE achieves 84.9% exact state-transition accuracy, 91.6% evidence precision, 89.6% evidence recall, 100% monotonicity, and 94.1% terminal-state accuracy. The evaluation establishes compelling symbolic-state performance across standard, multi-goal, RAG-detour, validation, refusal, and robustness scenarios.

Ramon Gonzalez, Antonio Diaz

Mentomy AI · Department of AI Research, Mentomy AI Almería, Spain

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Spoken Dialogue Systems Symbolic Reasoning Conversational Agents Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

IRWOZ 2.0: A Large Language Model-driven Dialogue Dataset for Industrial Robot Conversations

IRWOZ has improved industrial human-robot interaction (HRI) dialogue systems through domain-specific annotations. However, its initial version contains substantial noise in dialogue states and utterances, limiting state-tracking accuracy. We introduce IRWOZ 2.0, which addresses these limitations through large language model (LLM) enhanced generation (Mistral/Claude-3.5) and quality refinements. Our improved dataset expands to 390 dialogues across 4 industrial domains (Assembly, Delivery, Position, Relocation), featuring manual corrections and automated typo removal. Benchmark experiments on dialogue state tracking demonstrate significant improvements, with GPT-2's BLEU-4 score increasing from 0.1651 to 0.5604 compared to original IRWOZ. To support industrial HRI research, we publicly released IRWOZ 2.0 dataset at https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/irwoz-20-large-language-model-driven-dialogue-dataset-industrial-robot-conversations

Chen Li, Dimitrios Chrysostomou

Department of Materials and Production, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 16, Aalborg, 9220, Denmark.

Spoken Dialogue Systems Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Industrial Robotics Human-Robot Interaction Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Sep 3, 2026cs.CL

Decoupling Turn-Taking from Semantics: A Decoupled Data Approach for Finite-State-Machine-Based Full-Duplex Dialogue

The Neural Finite State Machine (NFSM) framework offers a pragmatic path to full-duplex dialogue by serializing turn-taking control and response generation onto a single causal tape under the standard next-token prediction objective, thereby preserving semantic prowess at a low fine-tuning cost. However, its reliance on synthetic text data fundamentally limits turn-taking naturalness, as Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot faithfully simulate the fine-grained acoustic temporal dynamics of real human dialogues. In this work, we propose a decoupled data approach that learns turn-taking from real Human-Human (HH) spoken dialogues while shaping semantic behavior through configurable Human-Agent (HA) text dialogues. To operationalize this approach, we introduce a rule-based event-guided data transformation method that serializes HH spoken dialogues into FSM tapes by classifying turn-taking events and applying deterministic mapping rules, enabling scalable supervision without LLM-generated annotations. We further propose a Source-Aware Calibrated (SAC) Loss that jointly calibrates the long-tailed distribution of state transition tokens and channels each data source toward the capability it best supervises. Experiments show that our approach substantially improves turn-taking proficiency while recovering the foundation LLM's semantic capability. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Liyht/def-fsm.

Yihang Li, Chenhui Chu

Kyoto University

Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Language Models Turn-Taking Prediction Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

AVERT: Audio-Verified Adjudication for Spoken Dialogue State Tracking

Spoken dialogue state tracking recovers slot-value pairs from speech, where ASR errors concentrate in entity values and persist across turns, making it both a generation and an editing problem. A strong per-turn text editor corrects much of this but, operating on the transcript alone, leaves three recoverable errors: a value predicted inconsistently across turns, an omitted slot, and a value the audio does not support. We present AVERT, which scores each candidate value by combining cross-turn agreement with a trained audio-conditioned verifier and resolves the three error types with three operators, vote, add, and swap, each restricted to the slots where its error is common. On SpokenWOZ, a base speech-LLM reaches 33.04 JGA, a text editor 38.34, and AVERT 40.13, without retraining either. This is in the range of a 1B end-to-end system that consumes the full spoken history (39.32), though AVERT uses two 1B decoders rather than one. The audio verifier contributes a statistically significant gain, and restricting each operator to a selected slot subset matters: removing it lets unrestricted voting overwrite correct categorical values and fall below the editor.

Chunggi Lee, Hanspeter Pfister

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Spoken Language Understanding Spoken Dialogue Systems State Tracking

Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

TEIDAN: A Multilingual Multiparty Dialogue Corpus

Multi-party interaction is a central setting for human communication and a necessary target for human-agent interaction systems that must participate in group conversation. Yet available corpora often focus on meetings, task-oriented interaction, text-based interaction, or acted scenarios, and fewer resources support cross-linguistic comparison of spontaneous face-to-face triadic discussion. This paper presents TEIDAN, a multilingual multimodal corpus that currently consists of Japanese and English three-party conversations. TEIDAN records groups of three participants discussing open-ended topics with individual pin microphones, a microphone array, and participant-facing cameras, and provides IPU-based transcripts for both language portions. Earlier studies used subsets of the Japanese portion for task-specific benchmarks in multi-party dialogue modeling; in contrast, this paper presents TEIDAN as a corpus resource spanning both Japanese and English, with planned expansion to additional languages. We describe the collection design, participants, recording setup, transcription format, and corpus statistics, and provide preliminary analyses to illustrate how TEIDAN can support research on turn-taking, addressee recognition, and multimodal grounding in human-human and human-agent interaction.

Taiga Mori, Koji Inoue, Mikey Elmers +2

Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University · Japan

Spoken Dialogue Systems Turn-Taking in Dialogue

Sep 1, 2026cs.RO

Human-robot conversation with multiple participants in noisy public spaces

For noisy real-world environments such as those in open public spaces, spoken dialogue systems for both autonomous robots and avatars should be carefully designed to provide enhanced speech signals. These signals can be used either for speech recognition or, in the case of an avatar system, transmitted as clean speech to a remote operator. This work proposes an audio system that can be used for both these scenarios and was demonstrated as a proof-of-concept at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka. The first scenario is an attentive listening system with the android ERICA, and the second is a conversation support system with mobile Teleco robots, with one of them acting as an avatar for a remote operator. Both systems feature multi-party conversation and use a single multi-channel microphone array. We describe how our audio system not only enhances the speech of multiple speakers in a noisy environment, but provides a form of spatial audio which allows for more immersiveness in avatar-based conversational interactions.

Divesh Lala, Yogeeswaran Muthukumaran, Vincent Fernandes +10

1Kyoto University Graduate School of Informatics · 2Osaka University, Graduate School of Engineering Science · 3National University of Singapore +1

Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Enhancement Spatial Audio Human-Robot Interaction

Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Conversation Coach: A Voice-enabled AI System that Helps Practice Difficult Workplace Conversations

Effective manager-employee communication is critical for retaining high performers and developing underperformers, yet training managers in these skills remains costly. Text-based chatbots offer a scalable approach but cannot provide realistic rehearsal: managers need to practice speaking aloud to build confidence before high-stakes conversations. In this paper, we propose Conversation Coach, a voice-first AI system that enables managers to rehearse difficult workplace conversations in a realistic spoken format. The system addresses three challenges: achieving low-latency interactions with strong language understanding, enabling adaptive conversations through configurable bot personalities that simulate different employee types, and generating personalized feedback on content and policy compliance. We compare an end-to-end speech-to-speech model with a cascaded approach combining automatic speech recognition, a large language model, and text-to-speech synthesis. The end-to-end approach achieves 3

\times

lower median (P50) latency with native barge-in capability at an estimated 8

\times

lower cost, while the cascaded approach offers superior reasoning essential for coaching quality. We deployed the cascaded architecture in production, where 40,000+ managers used it over six months, with adoption patterns indicating selective use for difficult conversations.

Fanyou Wu, Suraj Maharjan, Ainur Yessenalina +3

Amazon

Spoken Dialogue Systems Speech Processing Conversational Agents