Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents
Summary
This paper introduces a conversational voice agent system that uses a lightweight on-device 'Talker' model to start responding immediately, then incorporates knowledge from a frontier LLM 'Reasoner' as it becomes available, achieving 7-19x faster time-to-first-response while approaching frontier-level performance on a laptop.
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Paper page - Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2511.07397 👋 Authors here, thanks for checking out our paper!
Summary:Conversational AI systems leverage lightweight models that can run real-time, but slower Frontier LLMs are more capable (accuracy, tool use, etc.). We use model collaboration to approach frontier-level performance in a responsive conversational system. A tiny on-deviceTalkerstarts replying in milliseconds and weaves in knowledge from a frontier LLMReasoneras it becomes available. This gives7–19× fastertime-to-first-response and runs on a laptop (Apple M2, 16 GB).
The 7Talkermodels and 290k-sample training dataset are in the collection linked.
We’ve also got a repo set up here 💻github.com/vysri/conversational-infill. It has the runnable demo (same as the video) so you can load the released models and talk to the full system yourself, plus thetraining frameworkif you want to use the dataset to fine-tune other SLMs into your own Talkers.
Happy to answer any questions, we’ll be around in the comments!
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