Conversational speech → Voice agents
Conversational speech for Voice agents
Voice agents needs natural dialogue, interruptions, and task-oriented turns across accents and conditions. Here is why Conversational speech is the right raw material for it, what buyers typically spec, and how the rights are handled.
Why Conversational speech for Voice agents
A voice agent lives or dies on turn-taking: when to listen, when it is safe to speak, and what to do when a caller barges in mid-response. Those behaviours are learned from real dialogue, because scripted corpora contain almost no genuine interruptions, hesitations, or mid-turn repairs. Conversational speech supplies the phenomena an agent must survive — barge-in, endpointing ambiguity ("uh, hold on—"), topic shifts, background voices that are not the user — and the acoustic reality of deployment: telephony codecs, speakerphones, cars. Task-oriented conversation is the highest-value slice: two people actually booking, troubleshooting, or negotiating produce turn structures no roleplay reproduces. Teams also use this material for evaluation, replaying real dialogue patterns against the agent to measure interruption handling and endpointing latency rather than just transcript accuracy.
What buyers typically spec
Industry-typical ranges — a brief can and should deviate where the task demands it.
| Typical volume | Tens to hundreds of hours of task-oriented dialogue; smaller curated sets for turn-taking evaluation |
|---|---|
| Audio | Telephony-band (8 kHz) and wideband (16 kHz+) both represented; real device and channel conditions |
| Labels | Verbatim transcripts, turn timestamps, interruption/barge-in marks, task outcome annotations |
| Coverage | Accents, ages, and task domains matched to the agent’s deployment |
| Formats | WAV/FLAC; JSON dialogue structure |
A sample brief
The shape of a workable request — swap in your own numbers and conditions:
- Modality: real two-party task calls (scheduling, support, ordering), unscripted.
- Volume: 200 hours; en-US broad accent mix; phone and speakerphone conditions.
- Labels: verbatim transcripts, turn boundaries, barge-in events, task success tags.
- Rights: all-speaker consent, explicit AI-training grant, provenance documented.
fiund's sourcing angle
Most speech corpora are scripted and read aloud. Genuine conversation — interruptions, crosstalk, accents, overlapping talk — is what speech and audio models are short on, and it is the supply fiund has the warmest path to. We source to a brief and clear the rights before anything moves, so what you receive is both useful and defensible in diligence.
Rights posture
Signed licence, explicit training rights, separate voice/likeness consent, nothing scraped. See the rights & provenance guides.
Frequently asked questions
Why not train a voice agent on scripted task dialogues?
Scripted dialogues have clean turns and no genuine interruptions, so agents trained on them handle barge-in and hesitation badly. Real task conversation contains the timing chaos — overlaps, restarts, silence that is not an endpoint — that the agent must model to feel usable.
Does telephony audio (8 kHz) still matter?
If the agent answers phone calls, yes. Narrowband codecs remove spectral information wideband models rely on, and performance drops unless narrowband is represented in training or the pipeline resamples consistently. The brief should state the deployment channel.
What annotation captures interruption behaviour?
Timestamped turn boundaries plus explicit barge-in marks: where a speaker started while the other still held the floor, and whether the first speaker yielded. That is the supervision signal for endpointing and barge-in policies.
More Conversational speech use cases
Need Conversational speech for Voice agents?
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