Heartbeat Thinking: Speculative Reasoning and Tool Execution While Listening in Realtime Voice Agents
Tool-using voice agents often leave users waiting after speech ends, even when actionable information arrives earlier in the request. Speculative approaches begin work during speech, but chunk-bounded or interrupt-on-update generation can truncate a tool call before its arguments are complete. This couples computation time to speech updates, limiting useful work completed in advance. We introduce Heartbeat Thinking, which handles updated input through new Thinker invocations while allowing ongoing invocations and dispatched tools to finish. Periodic invocations read the latest partial transcript and a shared record of completed reasoning and tool results. These results help resolve missin...
| Authors | Zhenyu Zhang, Kewei Fu, Yongqi Tong et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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