Prompts versus Rules: Auditing and Controlling Speech Naturalness Behaviors in Voice User Simulators
As voice agents gain more popularity commercially, the user simulators used to evaluate the deployed agents are also being developed to include more realistic, variable, and diverse speech naturalness behaviors -- disfluency, interruption and backchanneling. The quality of the user simulator directly affects the validity of agent evaluation results. However, we find that most studies so far have not examined in detail whether the intended configuration for these behaviors is realized in the simulation. In this study, we audit the realized naturalness behaviors of tau-Voice, our own LLM-based prompting approach across three models, and our rule-based injection algorithm for disfluency, int...
| Authors | Riqiang Wang, Elena Khasanova, Harsh Saini et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 7 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 October 2026 |
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