Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level turn-taking without ASR

Re:Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level t... by dfajgljsldkjag on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:14AM (#46628719)

I am always skeptical of benchmarks that show perfect scores, especially when they come from the company selling the product. It feels like everyone claims to have solved conversational timing these days. I guess we will see if it is actually any good.

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Re:Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level t... by fudged71 on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:23AM (#46628775)

Different industry, but our marketing guy once said "You know what this [perfect] metric means? We can never use it in marketing because it's not believable"

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Re:Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level t... by khalic on Thursday January 15, 2026 @02:12AM (#46629143)

Just include some noise, it’s like the most available resource in the universe

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Re:Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level t... by drob518 on Thursday January 15, 2026 @07:05AM (#46631311)

Never thought of noise as a resource, but yea.

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Re:Show HN: Sparrow-1 – Audio-native model for human-level t... by bpanahij on Thursday January 15, 2026 @11:54AM (#46635444)

You should be skeptical, and try it out. I selected 28 long conversations for our evaluation set, all unseen audio. Every turn taking model makes tradeoffs, and I tried to make the best tradeoffs for each model by adjusting and tuning the implementations. I’m certainly not in a position as the creator of Sparrow to be totally objective. However we did use unaltered real conversational audio to evaluate. I tried to find examples that would challenge Sparrow-1 with lots of variation in speaker style across the conversations.

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