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.
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:2609.23416v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-form audio performance is often summarized by context length and aggregate accuracy, obscuring how language, evidence, and task jointly shape di...
By Zeyu Yang, Xinyu Zhang, Zibo Bi, Pei Zhang, Xize Cheng, Jin Xu, Baosong Yang, Satoshi Nakamura
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.
By Xinyi Liu, Hooshang Nayyeri, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Emine Yilmaz, JK Kim, Yifei Zhang, Charith Peris, Hari Thadakamalla
arXiv:2609.08899v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Speech deepfakes can mimic a speaker's voice convincingly enough to deceive listeners and automated systems. This has driven strong progress...
By Mengzhe Geng, Yujia Lu, Patrick Littell, Manuela Kunz, Xie Chen
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.