Journal article
Who Spoke Next Is Not Who Should Have: What Zero-Shot Failure on Multi-Party Turn-Taking Benchmarks Measures, Why the Human Reference Sits Beside the Models, and What Would Show That Knowing When to Speak Must Be Trained
An assistant that joins a group conversation has to decide, at every pause, whether to take the floor. Two 2026 benchmarks report that language models prompted zero-shot make this decision badly and that fine-tuning repairs it, and both conclude that knowing when to speak is learned rather than…