Current large language models (LLMs) and spoken language models (SLMs) begin thinking and taking actions only after the user has finished their turn. This prevents the model from interacting with the user during the user’s turn and can lead to high response latency when the model is thinking. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the “think while listening” behavior of humans. In this paper, we propose SHANKS, a general inference framework that enables SLMs to generate unspoken chain-of-thought reasoning while listening to user input. SHANKS streams input speech in fixed-duration chunks and, as soon as a chunk is received, generates unspoken reasoning based on all previous speech and reasoning, while the user continues speaking. SHANKS uses unspoken reasoning to determine whether to interrupt the user and make tool calls to complete the task. We demonstrate that SHANKS enhances real-time user–SLM interaction in two scenarios: (1) SHANKS can listen to the user’s speech and interrupt when the user makes a mistake. (2) In a tool-augmented dialogue scenario, SHANKS can complete 56.9% of the tool calls before the user ends their turn. Overall, SHANKS is a step toward models that keep thinking throughout the conversation, not only after a turn ends. Demos can be found on the project page: https://d223302.github.io/SHANKS/.

Audio-aware large language models (ALLMs) can understand the textual and non-textual information in the audio input. In this paper, we explore using ALLMs as an automatic judge to assess the speaking styles of speeches. We use ALLM judges to evaluate the speeches generated by SLMs on two tasks: voice style instruction following and role-playing. The speaking style we consider includes emotion, volume, speaking pace, word emphasis, pitch control, and non-verbal elements. We use four spoken language models (SLMs) to complete the two tasks and use humans and ALLMs to judge the SLMs’ responses. We compare two ALLM judges, GPT-4o-audio and Gemini-2.5-pro, with human evaluation results and show that the agreement between Gemini and human judges is comparable to the agreement between human evaluators. These promising results show that ALLMs can be used as a judge to evaluate SLMs. Our results also reveal that current SLMs, even GPT-4o-audio, still have room for improvement in controlling the speaking style and generating natural dialogues.