SpokenUS: A Spoken User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Jonggeun, Pyo, Junseong, Park, Jeongmin, Jo, Yohan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Lee, Jonggeun
Pyo, Junseong
Park, Jeongmin
Jo, Yohan
author_facet Lee, Jonggeun
Pyo, Junseong
Park, Jeongmin
Jo, Yohan
contents Robust task-oriented spoken dialogue agents require exposure to the full diversity of how people interact through speech. Building spoken user simulators that address this requires large-scale spoken task-oriented dialogue (TOD) data encompassing spoken user behaviors, yet existing datasets are limited in scale and domain coverage, with no systematic pipeline for augmenting them. To address this, we introduce \textbf{SpokenTOD}, a spoken TOD dataset of 52,390 dialogues and 1,034 hours of speech augmented with four spoken user behaviors -- cross-turn slots, barge-in, disfluency, and emotional prosody -- across diverse speakers and domains. Building on SpokenTOD, we present \textbf{SpokenUS}, a spoken user simulator grounded in TOD with a dedicated architecture for barge-in. SpokenUS achieves comparable goal coverage to significantly larger models while substantially outperforming all baselines in Human MOS, disclosing slot values gradually across the dialogue as humans do rather than front-loading them. Further analysis confirms that SpokenUS's spoken behaviors pose meaningful challenges to downstream agents, making it a practical tool for training and evaluating more robust spoken dialogue systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16783
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SpokenUS: A Spoken User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue
Lee, Jonggeun
Pyo, Junseong
Park, Jeongmin
Jo, Yohan
Computation and Language
Robust task-oriented spoken dialogue agents require exposure to the full diversity of how people interact through speech. Building spoken user simulators that address this requires large-scale spoken task-oriented dialogue (TOD) data encompassing spoken user behaviors, yet existing datasets are limited in scale and domain coverage, with no systematic pipeline for augmenting them. To address this, we introduce \textbf{SpokenTOD}, a spoken TOD dataset of 52,390 dialogues and 1,034 hours of speech augmented with four spoken user behaviors -- cross-turn slots, barge-in, disfluency, and emotional prosody -- across diverse speakers and domains. Building on SpokenTOD, we present \textbf{SpokenUS}, a spoken user simulator grounded in TOD with a dedicated architecture for barge-in. SpokenUS achieves comparable goal coverage to significantly larger models while substantially outperforming all baselines in Human MOS, disclosing slot values gradually across the dialogue as humans do rather than front-loading them. Further analysis confirms that SpokenUS's spoken behaviors pose meaningful challenges to downstream agents, making it a practical tool for training and evaluating more robust spoken dialogue systems.
title SpokenUS: A Spoken User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16783