# Spoken Function Calling: A New Perspective on Spoken Language Understanding for Large Audio Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05126/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (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 19 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is the core component of task-oriented dialogue systems and a pivotal link in achieving seamless human-agent interaction. While traditional SLU can effectively extract user semantics for closed-set tasks after in-domain supervised fine-tuning, it faces significant challenges in leveraging in-context learning for open-domain tasks due to its ambiguous rule definitions. This work proposes Spoken Function Calling (SFC), a novel semantic understanding perspective that optimizes semantic understanding with structured rule definitions, to evolve beyond traditional closed-set SLU. Specifically, we curate and extend a suite of spoken functions based on traditional SLU datasets, construct a multi-agent system to synthesize the SFC-Bench dataset, evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), and enhance the SFC capabilities of LALMs through post-training. Experiments demonstrate that SFC outperforms traditional SLU, substantially enhancing the semantic extraction accuracy for LLMs and LALMs.