English

WASIL: In-the-Wild Arabic Spoken Interactions with LLMs

Sound 2026-05-19 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) voice assistants are commonly built as cascaded Automatic Speech recognition (ASR) to LLM systems, where recognition errors can distort user intent. Dislikes may also arise from ambiguous, out-of-domain, or non-request turns, making it hard to isolate ASR effects. We release WASIL (it denotes connection or linking in Arabic): in-the-wild Arabic spoken interaction prompts with audio, ASR hypotheses, assistant responses, and explicit like/dislike feedback (8,529 turns; 14.2% dislikes), plus a 2,000-turn test set covering Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and four major dialects with their labels. We provide low-cost gold transcripts via multi-ASR agreement-guided post-editing and annotate answerability (answerable, ambiguous/needs-clarification, unsupported, not-a-request/noise) to separate intrinsic unanswerability from ASR-induced degradation. Finally, we describe scalable reference-free evaluation of responses from ASR vs. gold transcripts using multi-judge LLM scoring.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.16364,
  title  = {WASIL: In-the-Wild Arabic Spoken Interactions with LLMs},
  author = {Zien Sheikh Ali and Hamdy Mubarak and Soon-Gyo Jung and Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti and Firoj Alam and Shammur Absar Chowdhury},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16364},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Spoken Prompts, Multilingual LLMs, Speech-based Evaluation, Dialectal Speech, Low-resource Languages, Conversational AI, Speech-to-Text QA, Real-world Interaction, Spoken Language Understanding