arXiv:2605.13841v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Voice agents are increasingly deployed across enterprise applications. However, no existing benchmark jointly addresses realistic conversatio...
By Tara Bogavelli, Gabrielle Gauthier Melan\c{c}on, Katrina Stankiewicz, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Fanny Riols, Hoang H. Nguyen, Raghav Mehndiratta, Lindsay Devon Brin, Joseph Marinier, Hari Subramani, Anil Madamala, Sridhar Krishna Nemala, Srinivas Sunkara
The paper evaluates the use of large language models (LLMs) as judges for assessing conversational voice agents, comparing human judgments with GPT‑4.1 and GPT‑5 across telecom and retail interactions. It examines agreement, metric‑level correlations, and consistency across three evaluation configurations (p0, p1, p2) to determine how reliably LLMs can judge conversational quality and safety. The study finds that LLM‑based evaluation can be effective but its reliability varies by metric and configuration, suggesting a hybrid approach where LLMs handle scalable assessment while humans focus on metrics requiring contextual interpretation.
By Anupam Purwar, Shashank Singh, Kritika Srivastava
arXiv:2608. 10716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech-to-speech (S2S) voice agents are increasingly being incorporated into enterprise for customer care and as daily companions for consumers owing to the ease of the conversational modality over text.
By Aryan Vijay Bhosale, Harshit Rajgarhia, Akhil Pothanapalli, Asif Shaik, Abhishek Mukherji, Dinesh Manocha
The paper introduces Inquesto Score (IS), a protocol that measures voice‑agent reliability by calculating the percentage of calls that reach the caller’s goal without functional failure. IS defines explicit failure events and severity levels, evaluates timing, semantic, and state‑dependent failures using audio, scenario predicates, tool traces, and a pinned open‑model judge, and provides diagnostic views on behavior, acoustic robustness, identity handling, and speaker groups. The authors evaluate IS v0.1 on 30 scenarios, three acoustic conditions, four speaker groups, and 306 calls per agent across 13 configurations, demonstrating that reliable measurement requires evidence beyond transcripts and explicit treatment of deployment conditions.
By Massa Baali, Bhiksha Raj
arXiv:2609.35820v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: English-only benchmarks expose only a narrow slice of voice-agent behavior. We introduce $\tau$-Multilingual, extending $\tau$-Voice to Spanish, Braz...
By Soham Ray, Edgard dos Santos Paiva, Ruben Valenzuela, Karthik Narasimhan, Keshav Dhandhania, Victor Barres
arXiv:2609.24812v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Voice provides a natural and immediate interface for AI agents. Many settings in which voice agents could be useful, including meetings, households, an...
By Chenxu Xiong, Dongming Shen, Yuzhi Tang, Wentao Ma, Mu Li, Alex Smola
arXiv:2609.38867v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) computer-use agents are typically evaluated with clean written instructions, despite speech being an increasingly popular in...
By Terumi Chiba, Guangzhi Sun, Zheqi Yuan, Chao Zhang
For the first time, developers can also instruct the text-to-speech model to speak in a specific way—for example, “talk like a sympathetic customer service agent”—unlocking a new level of customization for voice agents.
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.
By Vignesh Ethiraj, Ashwath David
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
The paper introduces KVoiceBench, KOpenAudioBench, and KMMAU—three Korean speech benchmarks created through agent-driven frameworks that adapt existing SpokenQA and ASR resources into Korean SpokenQA and audio understanding tasks. These benchmarks total 12,345 samples and are publicly released to evaluate SpeechLMs beyond English. The authors benchmark eight recent SpeechLMs, revealing significant English‑Korean performance gaps and divergent rankings between SpokenQA and audio understanding, highlighting multilingual weaknesses not apparent in English-only tests.
By Haechan Kim, Seungjun Chung, Inkyu Park, Jihoo Lee, Jonghyun Lee