# SpokenUS: A Spoken User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16783 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16783/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Moshi: a speech-text foundation model for real-time dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00037/) (2024)
- [Finite Scalar Quantization: VQ-VAE Made Simple](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15505/) (2023)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [AudioGPT: Understanding and Generating Speech, Music, Sound, and Talking Head](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12995/) (2023)
- [GLM-4-Voice: Towards Intelligent and Human-Like End-to-End Spoken Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02612/) (2024)
- [CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17589/) (2025)
- [Taskmaster-1: Toward a Realistic and Diverse Dialog Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05358/) (2019)
- [Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00783/) (2021)
- [SpokenWOZ: A Large-Scale Speech-Text Benchmark for Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13040/) (2023)
- [Language Model Can Listen While Speaking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02622/) (2024)
- [PersonaPlex: Voice and Role Control for Full Duplex Conversational Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06053/) (2026)
- ["How Robust r u?": Evaluating Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems on Spoken Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13489/) (2021)
- [NeMo Inverse Text Normalization: From Development To Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05055/) (2021)
- [InteractiveOmni: A Unified Omni-modal Model for Audio-Visual Multi-turn Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13747/) (2025)
- [Non-Collaborative User Simulators for Tool Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23124/) (2025)
- [SimuHome: A Temporal- and Environment-Aware Benchmark for Smart Home LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24282/) (2025)
- [A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10759/) (2022)
- [Shallow Fusion of Weighted Finite-State Transducer and Language Model for Text Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15917/) (2022)
- [Towards End-to-End Integration of Dialog History for Improved Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05169/) (2022)
- [VocalBench-DF: A Benchmark for Evaluating Speech LLM Robustness to Disfluency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15406/) (2025)
- [PyTOD: Programmable Task-Oriented Dialogue with Execution Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15456/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Prompts versus Rules: Auditing and Controlling Speech Naturalness Behaviors in Voice User Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11015/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust voice agents require exposure to the full diversity of how people interact through speech. However, obtaining enough spoken interactions is prohibitively expensive. 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 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 SpokenUS, a spoken user simulator grounded in TOD that decides when to speak through a dedicated turn-taking head. SpokenUS achieves comparable goal coverage to much 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 voice agents, making it a practical tool for evaluating more robust spoken dialogue systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/holi-lab/SpokenUS.