arXiv:2607. 12085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating retail conversational agents requires methods beyond lexical-overlap metrics to assess intent alignment, factuality, helpfulness, clarity, tone, and overall response quality.
By Niranjan Kumar M, Balaji Nagarajan, Karthik Nair, Faysal Satter, Nithin Surendran
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:2609.38867v1 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
The paper introduces UPHELD, a large benchmark of human-to-human dialogues written by professional script writers, featuring realistic turn densities and over 36,000 per-turn human annotations. It evaluates existing automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge methods, finding them unreliable against expert human judgment. Using UPHELD, the authors develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that improves correlation with human assessments by about 30%.
By Ilija Subasic, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao Chen
The paper reviews the fragmented literature on real‑time voice agents, noting that architecture, turn‑taking, and agentic evaluation communities rarely cite each other. It presents three evidence‑based claims: (1) architecture choice is a deployment constraint rather than a definitive solution, (2) evaluation has shifted from component quality to grounded outcomes, and (3) the dyadic assumption is breaking down as multiparty turn‑taking and reasoning become essential. The authors propose the TRG reporting standard to characterize agents by timing, recovery, and state‑verified outcomes, with an optional fourth axis for multiparty contexts.
By Shivam Negi, Arpit Rawat, Rashi Jain
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