Tencent's Gander aims to keep talking while it works in the background
Tencent's Hunyuan Speech team introduces Gander, a full-duplex voice model pairing a conversational 'cerebellum' with a swappable background agent 'brain'.
Tencent and university researchers unveiled Gander, a model that processes speech, images, and text simultaneously to hold real-time conversations while a background agent handles tasks like coding. A 'cerebellum' manages conversation timing in one-second segments while a swappable 'brain' (tested with an OpenAI GPT-5.6 family model) performs reasoning. Gander achieved the best timing on Full-Duplex-Bench v3, interrupting users in 8% of cases versus 13.5% for GPT-Realtime, but scored slightly below the weakest competitor on task accuracy. It was trained on about 2.7 million examples, and Tencent plans to release the weights and training data after completing its open source process.