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.
arXiv:2608.28916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are commonly evaluated with word error rate (WER), yet many voice workflows depend on exact written values f...
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...
arXiv:2608.20394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industry pipelines that turn speech into supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data via multi-stage refinement are increasingly adopted but, to our knowledge,...
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.
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."
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.
arXiv:2608. 02673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech editing for content creation requires precise control over both what an edit should do and where it should apply.
arXiv:2608. 19515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged.
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:2607. 08371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic multi-speaker conversations are widely used to train conversational automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but it remains unclear which timing properties make simulated data most useful.
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.
Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.