# SpokenWOZ: A Large-Scale Speech-Text Benchmark for Spoken Task-Oriented Dialogue Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13040/

## Key facts

- Cited by 71 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 24 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [MultiWOZ -- A Large-Scale Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz Dataset for Task-Oriented Dialogue Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00278/) (2018)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [A Network-based End-to-End Trainable Task-oriented Dialogue System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04562/) (2016)
- [MultiWOZ 2.2 : A Dialogue Dataset with Additional Annotation Corrections and State Tracking Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12720/) (2020)
- [Key-Value Retrieval Networks for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05414/) (2017)
- [TripPy: A Triple Copy Strategy for Value Independent Neural Dialog State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02877/) (2020)
- ["Going on a vacation" takes longer than "Going for a walk": A Study of Temporal Commonsense Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03065/) (2019)
- [UBAR: Towards Fully End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with GPT-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03539/) (2020)
- [GALAXY: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Task-Oriented Dialog with Semi-Supervised Learning and Explicit Policy Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14592/) (2021)
- [Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00783/) (2021)
- [Building a Conversational Agent Overnight with Dialogue Self-Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04871/) (2018)
- [RADDLE: An Evaluation Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Robust Task-oriented Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14666/) (2020)
- [SPACE-3: Unified Dialog Model Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06664/) (2022)
- [A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10759/) (2022)
- [SCL-RAI: Span-based Contrastive Learning with Retrieval Augmented Inference for Unlabeled Entity Problem in NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01646/) (2022)
- [CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11617/) (2022)
- [EVI: Multilingual Spoken Dialogue Tasks and Dataset for Knowledge-Based Enrolment, Verification, and Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13496/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [UltraEdit: Instruction-based Fine-Grained Image Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05282/) (2024)
- [VoiceBench: Benchmarking LLM-Based Voice Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17196/) (2024)
- [MMICL: Empowering Vision-language Model with Multi-Modal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07915/) (2023)
- [MMSU: A Massive Multi-task Spoken Language Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04779/) (2025)
- [LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11733/) (2025)
- [MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05840/) (2024)
- [Let's Go Real Talk: Spoken Dialogue Model for Face-to-Face Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07867/) (2024)
- [τ-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13686/) (2026)
- [Speech Robust Bench: A Robustness Benchmark For Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07937/) (2024)
- [GATEAU: Selecting Influential Samples for Long Context Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15633/) (2024)
- [A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05608/) (2025)
- [From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27660/) (2026)
- [Tapilot-Crossing: Benchmarking and Evolving LLMs Towards Interactive Data Analysis Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05307/) (2024)
- [WavReward: Spoken Dialogue Models With Generalist Reward Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09558/) (2025)
- [MTalk-Bench: Evaluating Speech-to-Speech Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues via Arena-style and Rubrics Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18240/) (2025)
- [Chronological Thinking in Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05150/) (2025)
- [Aligning Large Language Models to Follow Instructions and Hallucinate Less via Effective Data Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07340/) (2025)
- [InSerter: Speech Instruction Following with Unsupervised Interleaved Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02769/) (2025)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Maintain Contextual Faithfulness via Synthetic Tasks and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16483/) (2025)
- [Mining Clues from Incomplete Utterance: A Query-enhanced Network for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00866/) (2023)
- [OmniChat: Enhancing Spoken Dialogue Systems with Scalable Synthetic Data for Diverse Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01384/) (2025)
- [MULTI-Bench: A Multi-Turn Interactive Benchmark for Assessing Emotional Intelligence ability of Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00850/) (2025)
- [Crafter: A Multi-Agent Harness for Editable Scientific Figure Generation from Diverse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30611/) (2026)
- [Dialog2Flow: Pre-training Soft-Contrastive Action-Driven Sentence Embeddings for Automatic Dialog Flow Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18481/) (2024)
- [DeepDialogue: A Multi-Turn Emotionally-Rich Spoken Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19978/) (2025)
- [The Behavior Gap: Evaluating Zero-shot LLM Agents in Complex Task-Oriented Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12266/) (2025)
- [WavBench: Benchmarking Reasoning, Colloquialism, and Paralinguistics for End-to-End Spoken Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12135/) (2026)
- [Self-Explanation Prompting Improves Dialogue Understanding in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12940/) (2023)
- [Multi-level Value Alignment in Agentic AI Systems: Survey and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09656/) (2025)
- [AURA: Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and Automated Tool Use in Voice-Driven Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23049/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) models have made significant progress in recent years. However, previous studies primarily focus on datasets written by annotators, which has resulted in a gap between academic research and real-world spoken conversation scenarios. While several small-scale spoken TOD datasets are proposed to address robustness issues such as ASR errors, they ignore the unique challenges in spoken conversation. To tackle the limitations, we introduce SpokenWOZ, a large-scale speech-text dataset for spoken TOD, containing 8 domains, 203k turns, 5.7k dialogues and 249 hours of audios from human-to-human spoken conversations. SpokenWOZ further incorporates common spoken characteristics such as word-by-word processing and reasoning in spoken language. Based on these characteristics, we present cross-turn slot and reasoning slot detection as new challenges. We conduct experiments on various baselines, including text-modal models, newly proposed dual-modal models, and LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT. The results show that the current models still have substantial room for improvement in spoken conversation, where the most advanced dialogue state tracker only achieves 25.65% in joint goal accuracy and the SOTA end-to-end model only correctly completes the user request in 52.1% of dialogues. The dataset, code, and leaderboard are available: https://spokenwoz.github.io/.
