Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen
Speech conveys information through both words and vocal delivery. We evaluate four leading production realtime voice systems-OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash-on tasks where the words and the delivery patterns both convey meaningful information. Across three consequential scenarios, all four systems act on the words rather than the voice. They end calls with crying callers who insist nothing is wrong, approve wire transfers authorized in frightened voices, and enroll callers whose agreement is clearly sarcastic. Surprisingly, this is often not a failure of perception. When asked directly, three of the four systems relia...
| Authors | Martijn Bartelds, Federico Bianchi, James Zou |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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