arxivcs.CLcs.AIeess.AS2026-07-06
SPEARBench: A Benchmark for Naturalness Evaluation in Streaming Speech-to-Speech Language Models
Thomas Thebaud, Yuzhe Wang, Hao Zhang, Sathvik Manikantan Napa Ugandhar, Ashish Hallur, Georgi Tinchev, et al.
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, l…