VocalAffectBench: Evaluating Vocal Emotion Recognition in AI Audio Models
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.28932 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 Aug 2026]
Title:VocalAffectBench: Evaluating Vocal Emotion Recognition in AI Audio Models
View a PDF of the paper titled VocalAffectBench: Evaluating Vocal Emotion Recognition in AI Audio Models, by Models Luc Debaupte and 5 other authors
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Abstract:Voice products increasingly need affective cues that are present in speech but absent from transcripts. We introduce VocalAffectBench, a public, test-only benchmark for evaluating whether AI audio models can identify expressed vocal emotion from raw audio. The benchmark contains 273 human-recorded English WAV clips from 51 speaker accounts totaling 1.95 hours across seven labels: angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, neutral, sad, and surprised, with 39 clips per class. All baselines are evaluated from audio alone, without transcripts or contextual metadata. Across six released baselines, average accuracy is 35.5%. The strongest baseline, gemini_3_5_flash, reaches 46.5% on the seven-way task, above the 14.3% random baseline but far from robust emotion recognition. A secondary valence-bucket analysis maps labels into positive, neutral, and negative classes, excluding surprised because its valence is ambiguous. Aggregate accuracy under this coarser view is 50.9%. Performance is highly uneven across classes. By recall, neutral is identified most reliably at 75.6% averaged across baselines, while surprised and fearful reach only 10.7% and 15.4%, respectively. These results show that the evaluated baselines can extract some affective signal from speech, but discrete expressed-emotion recognition remains fragile, especially for non-neutral emotions that are often most important in voice agent workflows.
| Comments: | 6 pages, 6 tables. Benchmark, baseline predictions, and aggregate results are publicly available |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Sound (cs.SD) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.28932 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.28932v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28932
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled VocalAffectBench: Evaluating Vocal Emotion Recognition in AI Audio Models, by Models Luc Debaupte and 5 other authors
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