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
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:2603. 23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as primary sources of information, their potential for political bias may impact their objectivity.
By Rohan Khetan, Ashna Khetan
arXiv:2608. 10810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion understanding in discourse requires reasoning beyond surface sentiment because speakers often convey affect through indirect, implicit, polite, ironic, or deliberately mismatched expressions.
By Zhenyan Zheng, Yunyao Zhang, Junxi Sheng, Junqing Yu, Zikai Song
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: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
arXiv:2607. 24191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational stance detection has shifted from static text analysis to dynamic multimodal modeling.
By Heyan Chai, Xin Li, Wenjie Wang, Jianyang Qin, Chaoyang Li, Lu Wang, Hao Chen, Qing Liao
arXiv:2606. 24941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reviewing recorded interviews for affective cues such as composure and agitation is slow and subjective, and cloud services that could automate the task require sensitive audio to leave the device.
By Wai Laam Mak, Isibor Kennedy Ihianle, Pedro Machado
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:2606. 00851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empathetic spoken dialogue systems must infer a user's emotional state to respond appropriately, yet everyday speech often carries weak, neutral, or ambiguous affective cues.
By Sukru Samet Dindar, Riki Shimizu, Xilin Jiang, Nima Mesgarani
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.
Large Language Models (LLMs) as judges across various scenarios such as assessing model responses is becoming an increasingly accepted paradigm. However, existing judgment approaches often rely on trained judgers using fixed preference data, which tend to overlook diverse user preferences and struggle to adapt to real-world human-AI dialogue scenarios.