SpeechEQ

SpeechEQ benchmark evaluates emotional intelligence in speech-language models across 15 EQ subscales

Researchers introduce SpeechEQ, a benchmark framework for evaluating sociolinguistic and emotional reasoning in Speech-Language Models (SLMs), comprising 2,265 multi-turn dialogues across 15 Emotional Quotient subscales grounded in EQ-i 2.0 theory. The benchmark reveals three systematic failure modes in current multimodal models: over-reliance on text (modality shortcut), alignment-induced safety trap, and contextual amnesia across turns. End-to-end architectures outperform cascaded systems but all evaluated models fall short of genuine emotional awareness. The dataset and demo are publicly released on HuggingFace.