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abstract indexed · arXiv 2609.21967 · updated 2026-10-18

NemotronLabs VoiceChat: An Open Full-duplex Speech-to-Speech Model with Tool Calling Capabilities

First page of NemotronLabs VoiceChat: An Open Full-duplex Speech-to-Speech Model with Tool Calling Capabilities
From the original paper · arXiv 2609.21967Page 1. Select the image to read the PDF.

The technique replaces the conventional cascaded voice-agent pipeline (streaming ASR, LLM with tool calling, and TTS chained as separate services) with a single unified full-duplex speech-to-speech model that handles interruption, backchanneling, and function calls natively. It costs the deployment burden of a multi-component streaming model (speech encoder, decoder LM, RNN-T branch, streaming TTS decoder) whose total footprint is not stated in the abstract and may exceed a single 24 GB GPU, plus the engineering cost of integrating streaming audio I/O and tool runtimes. It can fail on tool execution specifically, since the authors state argument accuracy and end-to-end tool execution remain areas for improvement, and any regression in full-duplex timing degrades conversational quality in ways the text-only stack would not.

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research area
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Full-duplex speech-to-speech model with native tool calling
published
2026-09-18

The reader's constrained infrastructure and production focus make a newly released open full-duplex speech model with unverified local resource requirements and known tool-execution weaknesses something to track rather than deploy or validate immediately.

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  1. claim 01Paperraft inference
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    The technique replaces the conventional cascaded voice-agent pipeline (streaming ASR, LLM with tool calling, and TTS chained as separate services) with a single unified full-duplex speech-to-speech model that handles interruption, backchanneling, and function calls natively. It costs the deployment burden of a multi-component streaming model (speech encoder, decoder LM, RNN-T branch, streaming TTS decoder) whose total footprint is not stated in the abstract and may exceed a single 24 GB GPU, plus the engineering cost of integrating streaming audio I/O and tool runtimes. It can fail on tool execution specifically, since the authors state argument accuracy and end-to-end tool execution remain areas for improvement, and any regression in full-duplex timing degrades conversational quality in ways the text-only stack would not.

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  2. claim 02Paperraft inference

    On Full-Duplex-Bench 3.0, 82.5% tool-selection F1; 55.1 normalized average on VoiceBench; lowest pause-handling takeover rates among open-weight systems, with argument accuracy and end-to-end tool execution noted as weak points.

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quality

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