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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 26410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Voice Memory, a inference-only scheme for agentic speech recognition: at stream time, a frozen corrector reads a single per-domain memory.
We present Voice Memory, a inference-only scheme for agentic speech recognition: at stream time, a frozen corrector reads a single per-domain memory. md and decides per utterance whether to act on the hypothesis or abstain and keep the 1-best.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 04223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reduces but does not eliminate hallucination, and existing detectors return a single answer-level score that does not indicate which sentence is unsupported, or why.
arXiv:2606. 07080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present dots.
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.
arXiv:2606. 07608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic study of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper large-v3 for Swiss German ASR, using 1,367 hours of broadcast speech paired with Standard German subtitles as weak supervision.
arXiv:2606. 18323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open autoregressive neural-codec text-to-speech (TTS) models sound excellent on typical inputs yet suffer stochastic catastrophic failures: on a meaningful fraction of utterances they emit silence, terminate early, or collapse into repetitive or hallucinated content.
arXiv:2606. 07547v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-based large language models are typically constrained to spoken replies, which limits their user-facing outputs to what can be verbalized and suppresses text-native capabilities such as code generation, structured analysis, and multi-step reasoning in realtime interaction, for tasks that require persistent, structured, and inspectable intermediate outputs.