τ-Voice

In the authors’ words

Full-duplex voice agents–systems that listen and speak simultaneously–are rapidly moving from research to production. However, existing evaluations address conversational dynamics and task completion in isolation. We introduce τ-voice, a benchmark for evaluating voice agents on grounded tasks with real-world complexity: agents must navigate complex multi-turn conversations, adhere to domain policies, and interact with the environment. The framework extends τ²-bench into a novel voice agent benchmark combining verifiable completion of complex grounded tasks, full-duplex interaction, and realistic audio–enabling direct comparison between voice and text performance. A controllable and realistic voice user simulator provides diverse accents, realistic audio environments, and rich turn-taking dynamics; by decoupling simulation from wall-clock time, the user simulator can use the most capable LLM without real-time constraints. We evaluate task completion (pass@1) and voice interaction quality across 278 tasks: while GPT-5 (reasoning) achieves 85%, voice agents reach only 31–51% under clean conditions and 26–38% under realistic conditions with noise and diverse accents–retaining only 30–45% of text capability; qualitative analysis confirms 79–90% of failures stem from agent behavior, suggesting that observed failures primarily reflect agent behavior under our evaluation setup. τ-voice provides a reproducible testbed for measuring progress toward voice agents that are natural, conversational, and reliable.