arXiv AI

Lost in Phonation: Voice Quality Variation as an Evaluation Dimension for Speech Foundation Models

arXiv:2510. 25577v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Speech Foundation Models (SFMs) enable direct processing of raw audio, allowing models to respond to subtle paralinguistic variation.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

RW-Voice-EQ Bench: A Real World Benchmark for Evaluating Voice AI Systems

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 Computation and Language
Aug 31

A Shaky Voice Is Not Always a Dodge: Benchmarking Textual and Vocal Evasion Detection in Earnings Calls

The paper introduces DualEvasion, a benchmark that evaluates evasion detection in earnings call Q&A using both textual transcripts and vocal cues. It contains 505 annotated question‑answer pairs from 60 calls, each labeled for textual evasion (direct vs. evasive) and speaker confidence (confident vs. unconfident). Experiments show that current multimodal models struggle to detect vocal confidence, especially in unconfident responses, and that providing speaker‑level references only modestly improves performance, leaving a significant gap compared to humans.

By Mirae Kim, Seonghun Jeong, Youngjun Kwak
arXiv AI
Sep 16

RoleBreak: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Role-Playing Robustness in Spoken Dialogue

RoleBreak is an open benchmark designed to evaluate long‑horizon role‑playing robustness in spoken dialogue systems. It includes 310 character‑based and user‑centered roles, 6,688 human‑verified dialogue turns, and 11,743 fine‑grained evaluation criteria, with 1,856 turns specifically targeting expressive vocal emotion. The benchmark stresses role consistency, interaction quality, safety, and affect over extended conversations, and the authors evaluated nine system configurations across full‑duplex, omni‑modal, and cascaded ASR–LLM–TTS paradigms.

By Yuqi Wang, Fengyuan Liu, Haochen Luo, Zhiqi Yu, Qi Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 17

Face-voice Association across LAnguages and Gender (FLAG) 2027 Challenge Evaluation Plan

arXiv:2609.17913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Face--voice association models may rely on language or gender cues in the voice rather than on speaker-specific voice characteristics, which can lead t...

By Marta Moscati, Swapnil Khandoker, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Shah Nawaz, Fatima Noor, Rohan Kumar Das, Mubashir Noman, Junaid Mir, Muhammad Haroon Yousaf, Khalid Malik, Markus Schedl
arXiv AI
Sep 2

VoiceLongMemEval: Do Assistants Remember How You Sounded?

VoiceLongMemEval (VLME) is a new benchmark that tests AI assistants on their ability to remember how users sounded by incorporating paralinguistic metadata—such as emotion labels, prosody descriptors, and voice events—into each conversational turn. The benchmark uses a three‑stage adversarial gate to ensure that models cannot succeed with transcript alone, revealing a significant affect gap: models gain 0.09 to 0.38 accuracy when provided with paralinguistic cues, and audio‑native models outperform standard ASR pipelines in extracting these signals. The dataset and code will be released upon acceptance.

By Ramit Pahwa, Parivesh Priye, Apoorva Beedu