Live Agent Interaction over MoQ

2026-07-04: -00 → -01 bump (July 3) — the follow-on revision the first-look flagged to watch for. draft-liu-moq-live-agent-interaction-01 was posted July 3 2026, five days after the -00 submission. It remains an individual draft (not adopted; RFC stream “None”, IESG state “I-D Exists”), and the Datatracker shows no explicit -00→-01 changelog; the abstract is unchanged in shape (ASR-transcript / LLM-token / TTS-audio mapping onto MOQT’s Group/Subgroup/Object hierarchy, turn-taking with barge-in, a pure application profile). Notable mainly as continued Alibaba investment in the “MoQ as a reusable real-time substrate” thesis — a second revision inside a week — but still undiscussed on the moq@ietf.org list. Logged as a revision event; watch for any call for adoption or WG-list reaction. See discussions-2026-07.

2026-06-30: First-look — a new individual I-D applies MoQ to real-time AI-agent (voice) interaction, the first MoQ + AI-agent draft the wiki has tracked. draft-liu-moq-live-agent-interaction-00 “Live Agent Interaction over MoQ” was submitted June 29 2026 by Yanmei Liu (Alibaba Inc.) and Dapeng Liu (Alibaba Cloud) — the second Alibaba MoQ artifact alongside the XQUIC implementation. It is a pure application profile: it adds no transport-layer mechanism, instead defining semantic conventions for mapping a live conversational AI session onto MOQT’s object hierarchy. Brand new and not yet discussed on the WG list; logged here as a first-look pending any uptake.

draft-liu-moq-live-agent-interaction-02 | individual submission | -00 submitted 2026-06-29, -01 posted 2026-07-03, -02 posted 2026-09-28 (34 pp; expires 2027-03-31)

Authors

• Yanmei Liu (Alibaba Inc.)
• Dapeng Liu (Alibaba Cloud)

Abstract (summary)

Defines an application-layer protocol for real-time interactive communication between users and AI agents over Media over QUIC Transport. It specifies how streaming inference outputs — ASR transcripts, LLM tokens, and TTS audio — map onto MOQT’s object hierarchy, defines turn-taking control with interruption (barge-in) support for voice conversations, and establishes track-structure conventions for live agent sessions. It operates as a pure application profile: it does not modify underlying transport semantics.

Key Ideas

• Maps the conversational structure onto the MOQT data model:
  • conversational turns → Groups
  • inference steps → Subgroups
  • token batches → Objects
• Leverages MOQT primitives directly: publish/subscribe, prioritized delivery, group-based organization, and the relay infrastructure.
• Turn-taking + barge-in: turn-control mechanisms with interruption support, the latency-critical requirement for natural voice conversation.
• Tool Action Authorization (new in -02, §2.5.2): for consequential agent actions (the draft’s examples are payments, permission changes and bookings), the agent publishes an AUTH_REQUIRED (0x08) control signal on control/agent, and the user answers with AUTH_RECEIPT (0x09) on control/user. Both carry tool_id, call_id and an opaque artifact (“an offline-verifiable receipt, a challenge reference, or another application-defined authorization artifact”), and both MUST be delivered reliably. The Tool Output Object’s flags field becomes status, plus metadata_flags (authorization-required / authorization-ref-present) and a JSON metadata blob. The agent “MUST keep the authorization artifact transport-agnostic”, so no separate authorization track is needed. The control-signal registry’s free range is now 0x0A–0xFF.
• Relay-transparent: because the structure is expressed in MOQT’s native Group/Subgroup/Object hierarchy, relays can route AI-agent traffic correctly without payload inspection — no new relay behavior required.

Why it matters

• First MoQ + AI-agent draft in the WG’s document space — extends MoQ’s framing beyond live media (video/audio/data) into conversational AI / voice-agent transport, a distinct application class.
• Demonstrates the “MoQ as a reusable real-time substrate” thesis: rather than a new wire protocol, it is a convention layer on top of the existing transport — the same “pure application profile” stance the WG has favored for keeping the core spec lean as it approaches WGLC.
• A second concrete Alibaba contribution to MoQ (after xquic-moq).

Status & Caveats

• Individual draft, now at -02 (posted Sep-28 2026; -01 July 3; -00 June 29). Not adopted, and not discussed on the moq@ietf.org list as of this writing. The only substantive -01→-02 change is the Tool Action Authorization section above; the references were refreshed to transport-21, loc-04 and secure-objects-01, and the abstract is unchanged.
• The wiki tracks individual drafts that are actively discussed or referenced; this one is logged as a first-look because it opens a new application category for MoQ. Watch for any WG-list reaction or follow-on revision.

Related

• moq-transport — the transport this profile runs over (turns→Groups, steps→Subgroups, tokens→Objects)
• moq-msf / moq-cmsf — streaming-format layers for media payloads (this draft is an application profile, not a media container)
• xquic-moq — Alibaba’s MoQ implementation
• subgroups-and-objects — the Group/Subgroup/Object data model this draft maps onto

External Links

• Datatracker