Hyunbae Jeon
2026
PersonaKit (PK): A Plug-and-Play Platform for User Testing Diverse Roles in Simulated Full-Duplex Dialogue
Hyunbae Jeon | Jinho D. Choi
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Hyunbae Jeon | Jinho D. Choi
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
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.