tavus.io• 1d ago• 1 min read
Show HN: Sparrow-2 – Solving the cocktail party problemHey there, I’m Brian. I've been shipping conversational models over here at Tavus for the past two years. I want to tell you about our new audio-understanding model: Sparrow-2! It’s a new category of model and a unique new approach to conversational audio.Earlier this year we launched Sparrow-1, (at the time) our SoTA turn taking model. Since our Sparrow-1 launch, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to humans talking and trying to really understand how people know when to talk, when to listen, and when to wait. I’ve also been hunting down failure modes of the current SoTA models. And while Sparrow-1 is great, there are some failure patterns I see. We tried solving the problems with existing approaches, but solving one problem only created another.Sparrow-1 and a lot of the existing turn taking models require noise cancellation to isolate the speaker’s audio from background noise. After removing the “noise” these models rely on simple prosodic and phonetic cues from spoken words to decid