A Modern System Recipe for Situated Embodied Human-Robot Conversation with Real-Time Multimodal LLMs and Tool-Calling

Abstract: Situated embodied conversation requires robots to interleave real-time dialogue with active perception: deciding what to look at, when to look, and what to say under tight latency constraints. We present a simple, minimal system recipe that pairs a real-time multimodal LLM with a small set of tool interfaces for attention and active perception. We study six home-style scenarios that require frequent attention shifts and increasing perceptual scope. Across four system variants, we evaluate turn-level tool-decision correctness against human annotations and collect subjective ratings of interaction quality. Results indicate that real-time multimodal LLMs and tool use for active perception is a promising direction for practical situated embodied conversation.