Heard Enough to Act: Early Tool Calling in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Abstract

Latency-sensitive spoken agents must know not only which tool to call, but also when they have heard enough to act. Waiting for the turn to complete delays execution even when the request is already actionable. However, neither existing spoken agents nor spoken dialogue corpora define the earliest point at which a request becomes actionable. We introduce a synthetic spoken-dialogue pipeline that provides earliest-actionable-point supervision, marking when the observed speech grounds a tool and its required arguments. Through controlled task generation, speech synthesis and alignment, and gated annotation, we construct 26,694 dialogues totaling 786 hours across 48 domains, with disjoint training and test argument values. We additionally create an audio rendering of $\tau^2$-bench for external evaluation. We train an omni-modal language model on this corpus, enabling causal, chunk-level decisions and partial-transcript generation for downstream call completion. The model achieves tool-state macro-F1 scores of 0.48 and 0.47 on held-out dialogues and the external benchmark, respectively. For correct calls, the estimated mean lead over a turn-end cascade, using the same formatter, is 1.8-2.0 seconds in-domain and 1.1 seconds on $\tau^2$-bench. These results demonstrate a data-driven path toward spoken agents that act while listening. We will open-source the pipeline and the training scripts.