arXiv:2606. 19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures.
AVERT is a method for spoken dialogue state tracking that improves upon a per-turn text editor by incorporating an audio-conditioned verifier to score candidate slot values. It addresses three types of recoverable errors—inconsistent values across turns, omitted slots, and values unsupported by audio—using three specialized operators: vote, add, and swap, each limited to relevant slots. On the SpokenWOZ dataset, AVERT achieves a joint goal accuracy of 40.13, surpassing both a base speech-LLM (33.04) and a text editor (38.34) without retraining, and matching the performance of a larger end‑to‑end system that processes the full spoken history.
arXiv:2609.05871v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-conditioned language models often underuse acoustic cues such as prosody, emotion, and non-speech sounds, raising the question of whether ASR-s...
The paper investigates how encoder-decoder models in ASR and NMT can generate fluent text even when the input contains no recoverable message, a phenomenon known as message-free hallucination. By auditing the models’ reserved null tokens and manipulating their scores, the authors show that a higher null-token score can suppress fabrication but may also delete valid content or shorten translations. The study highlights that the null token can serve as a diagnostic tool for hallucination and suggests evaluating abstention methods by considering both suppression and deletion costs.
arXiv:2608.22872v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-based applications pass spoken queries through automatic speech recognition (ASR) before any retrieval module, so ASR errors enter the pipeline...
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.
The paper investigates how to evaluate audio‑language models by separating the use of acoustic evidence from the need to invoke a generative audio model. Using a controlled call‑decision framework, the authors compare policies that rely on transcript labels, encoder outputs from CLAP, AST, or WavLM, and optional calls to generative models such as Qwen2‑Audio, Qwen2.5‑Omni, or MOSS‑Audio. Results on the VocalSound dataset show that while transcript‑only accuracy is low (0.296), encoder‑only controls achieve high accuracy (≈0.85) without any generative calls, and adding generative calls yields only a marginal improvement (0.925 vs. 0.921).
arXiv:2609.08899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speech deepfakes can mimic a speaker's voice convincingly enough to deceive listeners and automated systems. This has driven strong progress...
arXiv:2608.22872v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speech-based applications pass spoken queries through automatic speech recognition (ASR) before any retrieval module, so ASR errors enter the pipeline...
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."
The paper introduces a validation‑gated audit framework for voice AI customer‑care systems, treating them as stateful, multi‑turn, tool‑mediated interactions where bias and safety can manifest as added burdens before a final decision. The framework distinguishes between native speech‑to‑speech, cascaded ASR‑to‑LM‑to‑TTS, and hybrid architectures, and applies matched service facts across controlled caller presentation conditions to validate fact invariance, presentation cues, artifacts, and acoustic measurements. It outlines seven validation gates, a six‑family metric set, and demonstrates the approach with a synthetic refund‑dispute audit example, while noting that production results are withheld until the protocol is satisfied.
arXiv:2609. 11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized.