Talk2Agent: Benchmarking Voice Interfaces for Text Agents

Voice agents increasingly require reliable tool use from speech, whereas prominent tool-calling benchmarks remain text-based. We study whether verified text benchmarks can be converted into controlled audio-based tool calling evaluations without re-annotating the tool schema and gold labels. Our dataset-agnostic framework uses text-to-speech, speaker variation, and environmental noise to create paired text-audio instances while preserving the original dataset annotations. Based on extensive evaluation of 7 omni-modal models on audio-converted versions of Confetti and When2Call, our framework demonstrates that the performance is strongly model- and task-dependent: Gemini-3.1-Flash-Live obtains the highest Confetti score (70.4), whereas GPT-Realtime-1.5 performs best on When2Call (71.9). On Confetti, the text-to-voice gap ranges from 1.8 points for Qwen3-Omni to 4.8 points for GPT-Realtime-1.5. A targeted analysis of failure cases demonstrates that degradations most often reflect misunderstandings of argument values in the speech. Considering real-world deployment scenarios, we further report text-only results, an ambiguity-based reformulation stress test, and a reference-free LLM-as-judge protocol validated against human preferences. Notably, we find that open-source Qwen3 judges with at least 8B parameters exceed 80% agreement with proprietary judges, supporting privacy-preserving evaluation. Overall, our framework provides a verifiable and reproducible first-stage diagnostic that complements purpose-built audio corpora.

Voice assistants increasingly rely on Speech Language Models (SpeechLMs) to interpret spoken queries and execute complex tasks, yet existing benchmarks lack domain breadth, acoustic diversity, and compositional reasoning complexity to evaluate tool-calling performance. We introduce Audio2Tool, a large-scale dataset comprising approximately 30,000 queries designed to assess tool-calling capabilities of SpeechLMs across three primary domains: Smart Car, Smart Home, and Wearables. Our benchmark features a multi-tier complexity hierarchy, ranging from simple direct commands to complex multi-intent and needle-in-a-haystack extraction to isolate distinct failure modes. To ensure realism, we employ zero-shot voice cloning text-to-speech synthesis and diverse noise profiles to simulate in-the-wild conditions. Evaluations of state-of-the-art SpeechLMs and ASR-LLM pipelines show strong performance on simple commands but significant degradation under compositional and acoustic challenges. Code and dataset are publicly available on the project page: https://audio2tool.github.io/.

Production voice agents span cascaded, speech-to-speech, and hybrid architectures. Voice-agent benchmarks typically measure component quality and conversational properties such as word error rate, latency, naturalness, and turn-taking. Fewer measure whether the agent handled a phone call correctly on its own. Contact centers refer to this as ``containment'': the share of phone calls the automated system resolves without handing off to a human. On some phone calls the right outcome is refusal or a redirect. To address this gap, we introduce VAmoS Bench, the Voice Agent Simulation Bench. It measures complete voice-agent systems end to end in a stateful customer-support task. The agent is Riley, a credit-card support representative for a fictional bank who can freeze, cancel, replace, or activate a card. Each of 100 scenarios supplies a simulated caller with a private goal and a seeded PostgreSQL backend. The platform uses each scenario to populate and activate an isolated simulation in which the caller reaches Riley over audio; roughly one-third apply adversarial pressure. The agent can use five tools that execute real SQL against the backend. Each scenario also defines binary assertions. A grader evaluates them against the complete trace of what the caller and agent said and what the agent did, including tool invocations, arguments, and returned rows. This catches an agent that claims to have changed a card without updating the database, as well as one that makes the right database change while disclosing protected information. This first benchmark version focuses on financial services. Its evaluation protocol supports an evolving leaderboard: additional voice agents can be evaluated on the same version, while later versions can expand the tasks and scenarios.