There's a really interesting project in Japanese natural language processing called J-Moshi that had a novel approach and in my opinion good results.

They tried to make it mimic the way Japanese is full of really quick acknowledgement sounds and it seems to allow it to handle those pauses and interruptions really well.

https://en.nagoya-u.ac.jp/news/articles/say-hello-to-j-moshi... (english)

https://nu-dialogue.github.io/j-moshi/ (japanese and english)

I must admit it's a bit weird when LLMs laugh, I don't really know how I feel about that but it seems to laugh at the right times. Very tangential, but cockatoos have been known to mimic the right time to laugh presumably based on tonal cues that a joke was just made (I have experienced this first hand with rescue birds who li e amongst humans)