  This paper explores the potential of constructing an AI spoken dialogue
system that "thinks how to respond" and "thinks how to speak" simultaneously,
which more closely aligns with the human speech production process compared to
the current cascade pipeline of independent chatbot and Text-to-Speech (TTS)
modules. We hypothesize that Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of
parameters possess significant speech understanding capabilities and can
jointly model dialogue responses and linguistic features. We conduct two sets
of experiments: 1) Prosodic structure prediction, a typical front-end task in
TTS, demonstrating the speech understanding ability of LLMs, and 2) Further
integrating dialogue response and a wide array of linguistic features using a
unified encoding format. Our results indicate that the LLM-based approach is a
promising direction for building unified spoken dialogue systems.
