arXiv:2606. 07309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction-following audio language models (ALMs) can be augmented with explicit acoustic cues, yet it remains unclear whether such cues are used in a grounded way when the raw audio is already available.
By Iosif Tsangko, Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Bj\"orn W. Schuller
arXiv:2607. 14846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current voice AI benchmarks typically evaluate isolated capabilities such as speech intelligibility, word error rate, or text-based dialogue quality, but they rarely test whether systems harness the acoustic information that distinguishes spoken language from its textual representation.
By David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks, Franc Camps-Febrer, Jakub Piotr C{\l}apa, Theo Lebryk, Jens Madsen, Olya Ossipova, Sharath Rao, Hoon Shin, Tigran Soghbatyan, Georg Streich, Rashish Tandon, Panagiotis Tzirakis
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have been widely used as judge models for the automatic evaluation of generated speech. However, prior approaches predominantly focus on holistic naturalness, leaving fine-grained paralinguistic distinctions underexplored.
arXiv:2608. 02235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have substantially improved speech naturalness and intelligibility across many languages.
By Ali Jafar, Amal Sarmad, Shifa Yousaf, Maryam Bashir
Audio-language models (ALMs) are increasingly used as judges for speech-to-speech systems, but a judge that receives audio may not actually use paralinguistic evidence. We introduce counterfactual audits for paralinguistic response evaluation.
arXiv:2608. 09930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive.
By Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Simon Rosen, Jash Shah, Lindsay Devon Brin, Hoang H Nguyen, Anke Koelzer, Rachel Hansen, Tara Bogavelli, Fanny Riols
arXiv:2608. 00722v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language model-based text-to-speech (LM-based TTS) remains vulnerable to speech hallucinations that deviate from the target text.
By Chenlin Liu, Minghui Fang, Zhonghao Bi, Zekai Su, Rong Wang, Jiqing Han
arXiv:2607. 05365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech.
By Thomas Thebaud, Yuzhe Wang, Hao Zhang, Sathvik Manikantan Napa Ugandhar, Ashish Hallur, Georgi Tinchev, Venkatesh Ravichandran, Laureano Moro-Velazquez
arXiv:2606. 15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent.
By Jialong Mai, Jinxin Ji, Xiaofen Xing, Wencui Liu, Xiangmin Xu
arXiv:2607. 11801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large audio-language models (LALMs) often underperform on fine-grained, non-semantic attributes of speech, such as a speaker's emotion, despite strong performance on speech content.
By Yu-Han Huang, Chih-Kai Yang, Ke-Han Lu, An-Yu Cheng, Hung-yi Lee
Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech. However, standard speech and text benchmarks do not capture whether these systems behave naturally in conversations, where timing, turn-taking, prosody, interpersonal stance, language and dialect consistency, and relationship-aware appropriateness jointly shape perceived quality.
arXiv:2606. 11386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) enable seamless speech interaction by allowing models to listen and speak simultaneously, yet the internal mechanism by which they coordinate listening and speaking remains underexplored.
By Cheng-Kuang Chang, Kai-Wei Chang, Alexander H. Liu, James Glass