Can a sentence-completeness cue let an always-on assistant stop waiting so long before it replies?
research/ambient-semend
Can a sentence-completeness cue let an always-on assistant stop waiting so long before it replies: a stylised two-hangover endpointer cuts the mean wait from 913 to 574 ms at a 10% cut-off budget if no pause sits at a complete point, but only to 837 ms if half do; cue and pauses assumed.
What it found
A stylised signal-detection model: the endpointer waits a short hangover Hs after a sentence the cue calls complete and a longer Hl otherwise. With medium pauses (2 per turn, median 250 ms, assumed) and a 10% cut-off budget, a fixed hangover is 913 ms; a cue of quality d = 2 cuts the mean wait to 574 ms if no pause sits at a complete point, but only to 837 ms if half of them do, because the cue is blind to those. With long or widely spread pauses, where a fixed hangover is 1.9 to 2.6 s at a 5% budget, d = 3 gives 571 to 873 ms. The cue, the pause model and the share of clause-boundary pauses are assumed, not measured; only the 682 ms reply chain is measured. Closed forms agree with a Monte Carlo check.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.