Big Bench Audio
About
Speech reasoning benchmark testing whether a voice model understands and reasons over what is said, not just transcribes it. Covers 12 tasks including emotion recognition, spoken arithmetic, factual Q&A, and instruction following. Evaluated by Artificial Analysis on speech-to-speech models. Higher is better.Compare model scores alongside pricing, API availability, and release date — high benchmark score alone doesn't make a model the right pick.
How to read this benchmark
This benchmark uses a scoring system where higher is better. Scores are useful for directional filtering and model shortlisting, not for universal quality ranking.
Interpretation checklist: prefer benchmarks that are closest to your workload style, then validate against the linked model pages for pricing, context window, and provider availability.
Trust when:
- There is a fresh timestamped snapshot (or multiple snapshots) for this benchmark.
- Model list covers the same version family you can actually deploy today.
- Top candidates overlap with your required routing and feature requirements.
Don't trust when:
- There is only one benchmark snapshot or the dataset appears stale.
- Benchmark metric direction is opposite of your decision objective.
- The score difference between options is narrow and likely within implementation variance.
Current modeled score band for tracked entries is roughly 97.6 – 29.2.
Window
May 24 to Jun 7
last 3 snapshots
Mean delta
-20.13
score points
Coverage
4
models in latest snapshot
Leaderboard preview (top 5)
- 1. StepAudio 2.5 Realtime97.6
- 2. Grok Voice Think Fast 1.097.1
- 3. GPT Realtime 296.6
- 4. Amazon Nova 2 Sonic87.0
- 5. Nemotron 3 VoiceChat29.2