@inproceedings{yang-etal-2025-spoken,
    title = "Spoken Conversational Agents with Large Language Models",
    author = "Yang, Huck  and
      Stolcke, Andreas  and
      Heck, Larry P.",
    editor = "Pyatkin, Valentina  and
      Vlachos, Andreas",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-tutorials.3/",
    pages = "7--8",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-336-4",
    abstract = "Spoken conversational agents are converging toward voice-native LLMs. This tutorial distills the path from cascaded ASR/NLU to end-to-end, retrieval-and vision-grounded systems. We frame adaptation of text LLMs to audio, cross-modal alignment, and joint speech{--}text training; review datasets, metrics, and robustness across accents; and compare design choices (cascaded vs. E2E, post-ASR correction, streaming). We link industrial assistants to current open-domain and task-oriented agents, highlight reproducible baselines, and outline open problems in privacy, safety, and evaluation. Attendees leave with practical recipes and a clear systems-level roadmap."
}