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 rtca-workshop@googlegroups.com. We look forward to your contributions. On behalf of the RTCA Organising Committee, Niki Foteinopoulou