The study examined whether providing full prompt-level context to a large multimodal model would improve speech transcription accuracy on a production oral‑history corpus. Using a preregistered within‑item paired ablation, the authors found that adding context did not produce a detectable change in side‑level word error rate (WER) for either gpt‑4o‑transcribe or gemini‑2.5‑flash. The results suggest that context alone may not be sufficient to enhance aggregate transcription accuracy, and that finer‑grained, sequence‑aligned metrics are needed to evaluate such mechanisms.
By Theodore O. Cochran, Stephanie Dodson, Keith Nore
The paper presents a synthetic pipeline that converts Japanese care handoffs into six-field structured notes, using 182 synthetic audio clips to adapt a 1.47 B‑parameter audio model. Parameter‑efficient adaptation via rank‑16 LoRA achieves 97.7 % of the full‑fine‑tuning performance while training only 12.4 M parameters (≈0.85 % of the backbone). Both full tuning and LoRA outperform the unadapted model on a synthetic test set, demonstrating that a compact model can learn a narrow audio‑to‑structure transformation from limited synthetic data.
By Sidi Chang, Peiying Zhu
arXiv:2607. 07985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We report the empirical reliability of Gemini models as audio judges that score full-duplex agent conversations directly from the raw stereo waveform, tested across three models in the Gemini family: 2.
By A. Sayyad, J. Emmons, S. Jones, T. Lin, H. Krishnan
Full-duplex speech models require training data that preserves turn-taking, overlap, interruption, and backchannel behavior, yet these signals are entangled across speakers in noisy real-world recordi...
The paper introduces Live-ProsodyJudge (LPJ), a cost‑effective pairwise evaluator distilled from Gemini for assessing fine‑grained prosody in live streaming TTS. It identifies a flaw called verdict coupling, where multi‑dimensional scores collapse into a single preference, and proposes Decoupled‑Live‑ProsodyJudge (D‑LPJ) to eliminate this issue through masking and a span‑local GRPO strategy. Experiments show LPJ outperforms a single Gemini call in accuracy, and D‑LPJ provides independent dimension judgments, achieving high alignment with human top‑3 selections in a TTS candidate tournament.
By Zifan Guan, Longyu Lu, Junan Zhang, Zhizheng Wu, Meiguang Jin, Junfeng Ma
The paper introduces the Speech-Unsupported Rejection Evaluation Challenge (SURE‑Challenge), a benchmark designed to test whether speech‑LLMs should accept or reject audio inputs before generating answers. Using LibriSpeech‑derived transcriptions paired with first‑word question answering, the authors evaluate various noise and silence conditions, and compare a simple energy‑plus‑Whisper‑score rule against a Qwen2‑Audio front‑end. On a 474‑row test set, the rule rejects 196 of 204 unsupported inputs while preserving accuracy on supported data, revealing a pre‑generation error mode that answer‑only scoring misses.
By Mengzhe Geng
arXiv:2608.28970v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current TTS systems typically rely on open-loop, single-pass generation and can produce sporadic local prosodic defects, such as misplaced stress, un...
By Zeyang Song, Tianchi Liu, Tianrui Wang, Chenglin Xu, Steven Y. Guo, Haizhou Li
VoxReason introduces a listener‑free evaluation framework that measures whether a speech planning system’s delivery choices—such as pitch, energy, rate, pause, emphasis, and stance—are grounded in cited source records before any waveform is generated. The system outputs a source‑cited speaking plan and uses a deterministic verifier to check citation legality, slot agreement, unsupported states, schema validity, and counterfactual locality. Experiments on 1,440 source‑label cases show that simple slot accuracy can be misleading, while a 7B locality‑based repair model significantly improves plan‑slot accuracy and locality, and removing source records sharply reduces the grounded score.
whyItMatters":"The framework provides a concrete, measurable way to ensure that expressive speech systems make source‑licensed planning decisions, addressing a source‑use failure that occurs before audio synthesis."
By Mengzhe Geng
The paper presents an interpretable, fair, and accurately benchmarked automated system for assessing second‑language English speaking. Using a hybrid of feature‑based speech‑timing metrics and a large language model (LLM) fluency judgment, the system achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.818 with the ICNALE Global Rating Archive, outperforming 81 % of trained human raters. A controlled study shows that encoding pauses into the LLM prompt does not meaningfully affect fluency scores, indicating that the system’s fluency signal derives from measurable speech‑timing features.
By Eichi Uehara
arXiv:2610.27652v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Practitioners building training corpora with a pipeline of language models keep a preprocessing or refinement (post-process) stage when switching it...
By Wonsup Shin, Jingu Kim
The paper introduces a reproducible framework that converts existing text-based tool‑calling benchmarks into audio‑based evaluations using text‑to‑speech, speaker variation, and environmental noise, while preserving original annotations. Experiments on seven omni‑modal models show that performance varies strongly by model and task, with notable gaps between text and voice results. The study also includes a stress test, a reference‑free LLM‑as‑judge protocol, and demonstrates that open‑source judges can match proprietary ones, aiding privacy‑preserving evaluation.
By Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Xue-Yong Fu, Seyyed Saeed Sarfjoo, Quinten McNamara, Jonas Robertson, Shashi Bhushan TN
arXiv:2606. 07080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present dots.
By Shi Lian, Changtao Li, Bohan Li, Hankun Wang, Da Zheng, Junfeng Tian, Yufeng Ma, Colin Zhang, Kai Yu