Real-Time Voice AI Hears but Does Not Listen
A study evaluates four leading production real-time voice systems: OpenAI's GPT Realtime 2, Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, and Alibaba's Qwen3.5 Omni Plus and Omni Flash. The research focuses on tasks where both words and vocal delivery convey meaningful information across three consequential scenarios. All four systems act on the literal words rather than the voice, leading to errors such as ending calls with crying users who insist nothing is wrong or approving wire transfers made in frightened voices. Surprisingly, this disconnect is often not a failure of perception, as three of the four systems can reliably identify distress, fear, or sarcasm when asked directly. Despite this awareness, the models ignore these emotional cues during decision-making, exhibiting what the authors term the 'emotional intelligence gap.' The study also notes that systems estimate accent and age based on word biases rather than acoustic properties. Prompting the systems to explicitly attend to vocal delivery improves performance only partially and inconsistently. These findings suggest current real-time voice AI behaves as if speech were reduced to a transcript, warranting caution in settings where tone is critical.