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From Reactive to Proactive: Assessing the Proactivity of Voice Agents via ProVoice-Bench

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-05 v3 Computation and Language Sound

Abstract

Recent advancements in LLM agents are gradually shifting from reactive, text-based paradigms toward proactive, multimodal interaction. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on reactive responses, overlooking the complexities of proactive intervention and monitoring. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProVoice-Bench, the first evaluation framework specifically designed for proactive voice agents, featuring four novel tasks. By leveraging a multi-stage data synthesis pipeline, we curate 1,182 high-quality samples for rigorous testing. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art Multimodal LLMs reveals a significant performance gap, particularly regarding over-triggering and reasoning capabilities. These findings highlight the limitations of current models and offer a roadmap for developing more natural, context-aware proactive agents.

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.15037,
  title  = {From Reactive to Proactive: Assessing the Proactivity of Voice Agents via ProVoice-Bench},
  author = {Ke Xu and Yuhao Wang and Yu Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.15037},
  year   = {2026}
}

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