English

Towards Human-like Multimodal Conversational Agent by Generating Engaging Speech

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-09-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Human conversation involves language, speech, and visual cues, with each medium providing complementary information. For instance, speech conveys a vibe or tone not fully captured by text alone. While multimodal LLMs focus on generating text responses from diverse inputs, less attention has been paid to generating natural and engaging speech. We propose a human-like agent that generates speech responses based on conversation mood and responsive style information. To achieve this, we build a novel MultiSensory Conversation dataset focused on speech to enable agents to generate natural speech. We then propose a multimodal LLM-based model for generating text responses and voice descriptions, which are used to generate speech covering paralinguistic information. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing both visual and audio modalities in conversation to generate engaging speech. The source code is available in https://github.com/kimtaesu24/MSenC

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.14627,
  title  = {Towards Human-like Multimodal Conversational Agent by Generating Engaging Speech},
  author = {Taesoo Kim and Yongsik Jo and Hyunmin Song and Taehwan Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.14627},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Published in Interspeech 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:43:10.392Z