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arXiv · 2506.02457

SOVA-Bench: Benchmarking the Speech Conversation Ability for LLM-based Voice Assistant

Abstract

Thanks to the steady progress of large language models (LLMs), speech encoding algorithms and vocoder structure, recent advancements have enabled generating speech response directly from a user instruction. However, benchmarking the generated speech quality has been a neglected but critical issue, considering the shift from the pursuit of semantic accuracy to vivid and spontaneous speech flow. Previous evaluation focused on the speech-understanding ability, lacking a quantification of acoustic quality. In this paper, we propose Speech cOnversational Voice Assistant Benchmark (SOVA-Bench), providing a comprehension comparison of the general knowledge, speech recognition and understanding, along with both semantic and acoustic generative ability between available speech LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, SOVA-Bench is one of the most systematic evaluation frameworks for speech LLMs, inspiring the direction of voice interaction systems.

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Yixuan Hou, Heyang Liu, Yuhao Wang, Ziyang Cheng, Ronghua Wu, Qunshan Gu, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang. 2025-06-03. SOVA-Bench: Benchmarking the Speech Conversation Ability for LLM-based Voice Assistant. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02457

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