Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

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.

Voice agents face a fundamental tension: the reasoning, retrieval, and tool use that make foundation models capable are iterative and slow, while conversational interaction demands responses on a millisecond timescale. Smaller, real-time models meet the latency bar but cannot match foundation models on complex tasks, leaving current voice agents to trade away either responsiveness or capability. We introduce conversational infill, where a small talker model both immediately generates contextually grounded responses to hide the latency of an external reasoner model and fluently integrates streamed reasoner knowledge into its responses during inference. We curate a 290,571-example synthetic dataset spanning six domains and demonstrate that this task is learnable across seven widely used small language models ranging from 135M to 1.7B parameters. Our system implementation, ConvFill, sustains millisecond-level time-to-first-response while closing the accuracy gap to within 6.3% of the corresponding frontier reasoner performance. In a live user study (n=18) with talker deployments running on an Apple M2 SoC, participants rank ConvFill on par with frontier models overall, prefer it for retrieval-heavy tasks, and rate it significantly more responsive. These results show that conversational infill unlocks a new point on the latency-capability Pareto frontier, offering a practical path toward voice agents that are both responsive and highly capable. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/vysri/conversational-infill.
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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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