Reference-Based Prosody and Rhythm Evaluation for Spoken Dialogue Systems
Speech-to-speech (S2S) AI agents are advancing rapidly, yet evaluation lacks interpretable speech-native measures for conversational prosody and rhythm. Because $F_0$, speaking rate, articulation rate, and pausing shift with model-predicted speaker traits and interaction state, pooled human statistics can be poorly calibrated for evaluating a particular output. Using 4000+ hours of dyadic English conversation from the Seamless Interaction dataset, we construct matched reference regimes for $F_0$ mean, $F_0$ expressivity, speech rate, articulation rate, pause ratio, and mean pause duration. We then define a percentile-based evaluation protocol: extract the same metrics from an S2S output w...
| Authors | Ashish Hallur, Thomas Thebaud, Georgi Tinchev et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 June 2026 |
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