SpeechEQ: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence Quotient in Socially Aware Voice Conversational Models (opens in new tab)

As multimodal conversational systems increasingly engage in spoken interaction, their ability to navigate paralinguistic social cues has become a critical bottleneck for natural human-AI communication. However, existing evaluations of machine emotional intelligence assess reasoning exclusively through isolated text or passive acoustic perception, overlooking the complex cross-modal reasoning required for active, multi-turn dialogue. We introdu...