SALMONN-omni: A Codec-free LLM for Full-duplex Speech Understanding and Generation
Reviewed by Pithpith:3ZZHWCZYopen to challenge →
read the original abstract
Full-duplex multimodal large language models (LLMs) provide a unified framework for addressing diverse speech understanding and generation tasks, enabling more natural and seamless human-machine conversations. Unlike traditional modularised conversational AI systems, which separate speech recognition, understanding, and text-to-speech generation into distinct components, multimodal LLMs operate as single end-to-end models. This streamlined design eliminates error propagation across components and fully leverages the rich non-verbal information embedded in input speech signals. We introduce SALMONN-omni, a codec-free, full-duplex speech understanding and generation model capable of simultaneously listening to its own generated speech and background sounds while speaking. To support this capability, we propose a novel duplex spoken dialogue framework incorporating a ``thinking'' mechanism that facilitates asynchronous text and speech generation relying on embeddings instead of codecs (quantized speech and audio tokens). Experimental results demonstrate SALMONN-omni's versatility across a broad range of streaming speech tasks, including speech recognition, speech enhancement, and spoken question answering. Additionally, SALMONN-omni excels at managing turn-taking, barge-in, and echo cancellation scenarios, establishing its potential as a robust prototype for full-duplex conversational AI systems. To the best of our knowledge, SALMONN-omni is the first codec-free model of its kind. A full technical report along with model checkpoints will be released soon.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 14 Pith papers
-
FlexiSLM: A Dynamic and Controllable Frame Rate Spoken Language Model
FlexiSLM is the first spoken language model supporting dynamic and controllable frame rates on speech input and output, outperforming fixed-rate 7B models at high quality and enabling faster inference at lower rates l...
-
DuplexSLA: A Full-Duplex Spoken Language Model with Synchronized Speech, Language, and Action
DuplexSLA introduces a three-channel full-duplex architecture that synchronizes continuous user audio, discrete assistant audio, and rate-limited textual actions inside a single backbone for native turn-taking and in-...
-
Human-1 by Josh Talks: A Full-Duplex Conversational Modeling Framework in Hindi using Real-World Conversations
Human-1 is the first open full-duplex spoken dialogue system for Hindi, created by adapting Moshi with a custom tokenizer and training on 26,000 hours of real-world conversations to enable natural interruptions and overlaps.
-
ViBES: A Conversational Agent with Behaviorally-Intelligent 3D Virtual Body
ViBES introduces a speech-language-behavior model using modality-specific transformer experts that jointly generates dialogue and 3D body actions, showing gains over separate co-speech and text-to-motion baselines on ...
-
Communicating Sound Through Natural Language
Lexical acoustic coding lets LLMs transmit audio waveforms as editable natural-language sentences that another LLM can parse and reconstruct into sound.
-
FastTurn: Unifying Acoustic and Streaming Semantic Cues for Low-Latency and Robust Turn Detection
FastTurn unifies acoustic features and streaming CTC decoding for low-latency, robust turn detection in full-duplex dialogue systems and releases a realistic human-dialogue test set.
-
Mind-Paced Speaking: A Dual-Brain Approach to Real-Time Reasoning in Spoken Language Models
MPS proposes a dual-brain architecture separating formulation reasoning from articulation to achieve real-time CoT in SLMs with accuracy comparable to full pre-computation but much lower latency.
-
CogniRoute: Learning to Route Social Evidence in Omni-Modal Models
CogniRoute adds a cognitive schema and route-aware RL to an omni-modal MoE, reaching 59.38% accuracy on a new 118K-example social video QA benchmark and beating prior baselines by 15-27 points.
-
Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents
ModeratorLM conditions a streaming speech LLM on assigned roles for adaptive turn-taking in multi-party settings, reporting over 40% higher precision and 70% higher recall than non-role baselines on real meetings and ...
-
DuplexSLA: A Full-Duplex Spoken Language Model with Synchronized Speech, Language, and Action
DuplexSLA is a dual-stream three-channel full-duplex model that synchronizes continuous user audio, discrete assistant audio, and rate-limited action text for native turn-taking and in-conversation tool calling.
-
A Survey of Large Audio Language Models: Generalization, Trustworthiness, and Outlook
A survey of Large Audio Language Models that establishes a taxonomy of trustworthiness vulnerabilities and proposes a Defense-in-Depth roadmap for audio intelligence.
-
Human-1 by Josh Talks: A Full-Duplex Conversational Modeling Framework in Hindi using Real-World Conversations
Adapting Moshi to Hindi with a custom tokenizer and 26k hours of real conversations yields the first open full-duplex spoken dialogue system for an Indian language.
-
Full-Duplex Interaction in Spoken Dialogue Systems: A Comprehensive Study from the ICASSP 2026 HumDial Challenge
A new HumDial-FDBench benchmark and real human-recorded dual-channel dataset are released to assess full-duplex dialogue systems on interruptions and conversational flow.
-
Adaptive Turn-Taking for Real-time Multi-Party Voice Agents
ModeratorLM conditions a chunk-wise streaming speech LLM on assigned roles (with optional CoT) to raise turn-taking precision over 40% and recall over 70% versus non-role baselines on synthetic RolePlayConv data and r...
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.