[CfP] Real-Time Conversational Agents (RTCA) Workshop @ NeurIPS 2026 — submissions now open, deadline Aug 29 AoE

Dear colleagues,

(Apologies for cross-postings.)

We are pleased to share the Call for Papers and Demos for the
inaugural *Real-Time
Conversational Agents (RTCA)* Workshop, held in conjunction with *NeurIPS
2026* in Sydney, Australia, on 11 or 12 December 2026.

Website: https://rtcaneurips26.github.io/
Submission portal (OpenReview):
https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2026/Workshop/RTCA

*** Submissions now open — deadline 29 August 2026 (AoE) ***

Conversational AI has moved from text chat into the real world — voice
modes, embodied avatars, agents that share our screens. To feel *natural*,
these systems must operate in real time: streaming speech, video, and
language while continuously listening, watching, and re-planning. This is
fundamentally harder than offline generation — latency, turn-taking,
backchannels, interruptions, and cross-modal alignment become first-class
problems — and the field still lacks shared benchmarks, vocabulary, and
methodology for interactional naturalness. RTCA brings together researchers
across speech, vision, language, HCI, social-signal processing, and ML
systems around three intertwined questions: real-time generation under hard
latency budgets, naturalness in interaction, and evaluation of live systems.

*Topics of Interest* (non-exhaustive)

   - Streaming/low-latency speech synthesis, ASR, and full-duplex
   audio–language models
   - Real-time talking-head, avatar, and embodied video generation
   - Streaming language models; incremental and speculative decoding for
   dialogue
   - Turn-taking, backchanneling, interruption handling, floor management
   - Multimodal alignment under latency and partial-observation constraints
   - Prosody, emotion, and paralinguistic generation in interactive settings
   - Memory, grounding, and tool use during live conversation
   - Evaluation of naturalness: perceptual studies, turn-taking metrics,
   interactive Turing-style tests
   - Datasets and benchmarks for interactive (not offline) evaluation
   - Efficient inference and on-device deployment
   - Safety, identity, and trust in real-time agents (deepfakes,
   persuasion, consent)

Position papers, evaluation critiques, and reproducibility studies are also
welcome.

*Submission Types*

   - Full papers (up to 8 pages)
   - Short papers (up to 4 pages) — work in progress welcome
   - Demo papers (extended abstract or up to 2 pages) — required for the
   on-stage Conversational Agents Showcase

All submissions must use the NeurIPS 2026 style file and be formatted for
double-blind review. The workshop is non-archival; authors retain the right
to publish elsewhere.

*Important Dates* (End of day, Anywhere on Earth)

   - Submission deadline: *29 August 2026*
   - Author notification: 29 September 2026
   - Workshop: 11 or 12 December 2026, Sydney

*Confirmed Invited Speakers*

   - Dimitris Samaras — Stony Brook University, USA
   - Evonne Ng — Meta Reality Labs / UC Berkeley, USA

*Organisers*

   - Niki Foteinopoulou — Tavus, United Kingdom
   - Alessandro Conti — Tavus, Italy
   - Jack Saunders — Tavus, United Kingdom
   - Oya Celiktutan — King's College London, United Kingdom
   - Cigdem Beyan — University of Verona, Italy
   - Ioannis Patras — Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

For more information, visit our website https://rtcaneurips26.github.io/,
or contact us at [email protected].

We look forward to your contributions.

On behalf of the RTCA Organising Committee,
Niki Foteinopoulou

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