Sparrow-1 is a specialized, multilingual audio model for real-time conversational flow and floor transfer. It predicts when a system should listen, wait, or speak, enabling response timing that mirrors human conversation rather than simply responding as fast as possible.
Despite major advances in LLMs and TTS, conversational AI still lacks reliable human-level timing. Traditional voice systems wait for silence, then respond. Sparrow-1 instead models conversational timing continuously. This allows it to respond quickly, even instantaneously when the speaker is clearly done, all while deliberately waiting when they’re not.
The difference is subtle but transformative: Sparrow-1 doesn't just respond as fast as possible. It responds at the moment a human listener would.
Timing Is the Hard Part
Conversation is not just an exchange of words. It is a real-time coordination task where participants continuously anticipate when to respond, drawing on rhythm, hesitation, intonation, and meaning at the same time. Sparrow-1 models this coordination directly, aligning its behavior with the timing patterns humans use subconsciously during dialogue.
Research in conversation analysis and psycholinguistics has identified several key categories of signals that govern conversational-flow:
Semantic completeness: whether an utterance constitutes a complete thought, question, or request that projects a relevant response.
whether an utterance constitutes a complete thought, question, or request that projects a relevant response. Lexical structure: grammatical structure and speech act boundaries that create transition-relevance places.
grammatical structure and speech act boundaries that create transition-relevance places. Prosodic boundary markers: pitch contours, lengthening, and intensity changes that signal utterance completion.
pitch contours, lengthening, and intensity changes that signal utterance completion. Disfluencies and hesitation phenomena: filled pauses, false starts, and repairs that indicate ongoing cognitive processing.
... continue reading