PersonaKit (PK): A Plug-and-Play Platform for User Testing Diverse Roles in Simulated Full-Duplex Dialogue

Hyunbae Jeon, Jinho D. Choi


Abstract
As spoken dialogue systems take on diverse personas—authoritative instructors, uncooperative merchants, distracted workers—they need distinct, human-like turn-taking to stay immersive. Yet current full-duplex systems default to a rigid "always-yield" policy during overlap, undermining character consistency for non-submissive roles, and evaluating persona-specific alternatives through user studies demands substantial real-time engineering. We present PersonaKit (PK), an open-source, low-latency web platform that simulates full-duplex turn-taking pragmatics—via a cascade pipeline and prompt-level control rather than a jointly trained speak-while-listening model. Through intuitive JSON configurations, researchers define personas, specify probabilistic interruption handling (yield, hold, bridge, override), and auto-deploy comparative A/B surveys. An in-the-wild evaluation with 8 personas shows that PK is an extensible, end-to-end framework for studying complex sociolinguistic behaviors in next-generation spoken agents.
Anthology ID:
2026.sigdial-1.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
August
Year:
2026
Address:
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Editors:
Jinho D. Choi, Yun-Nung Chen, Kotaro Funakoshi, Ali Emami
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
597–601
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.42/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hyunbae Jeon and Jinho D. Choi. 2026. PersonaKit (PK): A Plug-and-Play Platform for User Testing Diverse Roles in Simulated Full-Duplex Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 597–601, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PersonaKit (PK): A Plug-and-Play Platform for User Testing Diverse Roles in Simulated Full-Duplex Dialogue (Jeon & Choi, SIGDIAL 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.sigdial-1.42.pdf