Real-Time Conversational Agents (RTCA) Workshop @ NeurIPS 2026 — submissions now open, deadline Aug 29 AoE [N]

Real-Time Conversational Agents (RTCA) workshop at NeurIPS 2026 (Sydney, Dec 11–12). Submissions are now open on OpenReview. What the workshop is about Conversational AI has crossed into real-time deployment — voice modes, embodied avatars, full-duplex speech agents — but the published record is still dominated by offline benchmarks, and deployed agents still feel robotic (stilted turn-taking, missing backchannels, monotone prosody, awkward interruptions). Methods that work offline (non-causal attention, large beam search, multi-pass refinement, slow diffusion) often don't transfer to streaming, and the field lacks shared vocabulary and benchmarks for interactional naturalness as distinct from per-utterance quality. The workshop is organised around three intertwined questions: Real-time generation under hard latency budgets — streaming speech, video, and language Naturalness in interaction — prosody, gaze, timing, grounding, turn-taking, backchannels Evaluation of live systems , where standard offline metrics fall short Topics of interest (non-exhaustive) Streaming/low-latency speech synthesis, ASR, and full-duplex audio–language models Real-time talking-head, avatar, and embodied video generation Streaming language models; incremental and speculative decoding for dialogue Turn-taking, backchanneling, interruption handling, floor management Multimodal alignment under latency and partial-observation constraints Prosody, emotion, and paralinguistic generation in interactive settings Memory, grounding, and tool use during live conversation Evaluation of naturalness: perceptual studies, turn-taking metrics, perceived latency, interactive Turing-style tests Datasets and benchmarks for interactive (not offline) evaluation Efficient inference, on-device deployment, systems–quality trade-offs Safety, identity, and trust in real-time agents (deepfakes, persuasion, consent) Position papers, evaluation critiques, and reproducibility studies are also welcome. Submission tracks