LLM Practitioners Meetup Karlsruhe #5
Details
Hey there,
it's time for the next LLM Practitioners Meetup!
It will take place on Wednesday, June 10th, 2026, at 6:30 PM, in the SteamWork Coworking Space (Roonstraße 23a, 76137 Karlsruhe). We'll provide food and drinks.
Our schedule:
6:30 pm: Get together
7:00 pm: Building Controllable Conversational Speech Systems (Research Talk by Maike Züfle)
7:45 pm: Discussions, pizza and drinks (until approx. 9 pm)
Looking forward to seeing you all there!
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Talk description:
„Spoken conversational systems require more than accurate speech generation to feel natural and engaging; they must adapt dynamically to context. Yet current systems rarely allow such customization, whether in speaker voice, conversation topic, or conversational behaviour such as overlapping speech and interruptions. In this talk I present F-Actor, the first open, instruction-following full-duplex conversational speech model trained under typical academic resource constraints. The model can follow explicit instructions to control speaker voice, conversation topic, and conversational behaviour, and I will discuss the design choices and training protocol that make this possible.“