Jakub Piotr Cłapa

David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks et al.

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. To this end, we introduce the Real World Voice EQ Bench, a multidimensional benchmark for evaluating voice AI across text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-speech (STS), speech understanding (SU), and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our evaluations indicate that performance is highly dimension-specific. For TTS, naturalness, expressiveness, identity stability, and reliability are largely independent evaluation dimensions. For STS, access to audio does not guarantee use of vocal affect, and some agents remain largely transcript-driven. For SU, models perform unevenly across paralinguistic tasks. For ASR, real world accent, emotion, noise, and conversational conditions expose failures that are not captured by established clean-speech benchmarks. Together, these results show that voice AI should be evaluated as a profile of acoustic, expressive, interactional, and robustness capabilities rather than by a single aggregate score.

Panagiotis Tzirakis, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks et al.

The 2026 ACII Dyadic Conversations (ACII-DaiKon) Workshop & Challenge introduces a benchmark for modeling interpersonal affect and social dynamics in dyadic conversations. Although conversational affect modeling has advanced rapidly, most benchmarks remain speaker-centric and underrepresent coupled, time-evolving processes between partners, including directional influence, conversational timing coordination, and rapport development. To address this gap, ACII-DaiKon presents three coordinated sub-challenges built on a shared dataset: (1) directional interpersonal influence prediction, (2) turn-taking prediction (next-speaker and time-to-next-speech), and (3) rapport trajectory prediction across full interactions. The challenge is built on the Hume-DaiKon dataset, comprising 945 dyadic conversations (743.4 hours of audiovisual data) collected under naturalistic conditions across five languages. The benchmark supports multimodal modeling, temporal reasoning, and cross-context generalization through fixed train/validation/test splits, standardized metrics, and released baseline systems. Evaluation uses Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC), Pearson correlation, Macro-F1, and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) depending on the sub-challenge. Baseline experiments establish initial reference performance, with best test results of 0.40 CCC and 0.50 Pearson for influence prediction, 0.66 Macro-F1 and 1.50~s MAE for turn-taking, and 0.68 CCC and 0.70 Pearson for rapport trajectory modeling. These results indicate that while current methods capture coarse dyadic patterns, robust modeling of directional dependence and long-horizon interpersonal dynamics remains challenging. The workshop provides a shared platform for rigorous comparison and cross-disciplinary discussion on data validity, evaluation protocols, and culturally aware modeling for dyadic interaction.