SpeechEQ: Benchmarking Emotional Intelligence Quotient in Socially Aware Voice Conversational Models

As multimodal conversational systems increasingly engage in spoken interaction, their ability to navigate paralinguistic social cues has become a critical bottleneck for natural human-AI communication. However, existing evaluations of machine emotional intelligence assess reasoning exclusively through isolated text or passive acoustic perception, overlooking the complex cross-modal reasoning required for active, multi-turn dialogue. We introduce \textsc{SpeechEQ}, a comprehensive framework designed to evaluate the sociolinguistic reasoning of Speech-Language Models (SLMs). The framework includes a validated dataset of 2,265 dialogues across 15 Emotional Quotient (EQ) subscales grounded in EQ-i 2.0 theory, along with a multi-turn evaluation protocol measured by our proposed Spoken EQ (SEQ) score inspired by human EQ assessments. Experiments show limitations in how both existing Speech Emotion Recognition and end-to-end Speech-Language Models understand and apply paralinguistic cues through speech. While end-to-end architectures outperform cascaded systems, \textsc{SpeechEQ} reveals that current multimodal models remain bottlenecked by a text-reliant ``modality shortcut,'' an alignment-induced ``safety trap,'' and ``contextual amnesia,'' highlighting the barriers to truly emotionally aware AI. Our benchmark can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SpeechEQ/SpeechEQ and demo page at https://binomial14.github.io/speecheq-demo/

ParaBridge: Bridging Paralinguistic Perception and Dialogue Behavior in Speech Language Models

Speech carries more information than just words: a child's voice, a fearful tone, or a noisy background should all lead a sufficiently competent spoken-dialogue assistant to different replies. Current Speech Language Models (SLMs) can recognize such paralinguistic cues but often ignore them in open-ended dialogue. We observe that a simple paralinguistic instruction scaffold at the inference stage narrows this perception-behavior gap, suggesting that the relevant cues are already latent in the model. Such scaffolds, however, remain brittle under multi-turn context and competing instructions. Therefore, we propose \textbf{ParaBridge}, an on-policy self-distillation method that turns a brittle inference-time scaffold into stable model behavior. During training, the scaffold serves only as a temporary privileged view; the scaffold-free model rolls out its own response, while the scaffolded view supplies dense, full-vocabulary next-token targets along its trajectory. This supervision teaches when non-lexical cues should affect the reply without the need for curated dialogues, human labels, or external reward models. On Qwen3-Omni-thinking, ParaBridge raises scaffold-free VoxSafeBench SAR from $14.6\%$ to $40.3\%$ and improves EchoMind average rating from $3.27$ to $3.92$. It also preserves general ability, with MMAU-Pro, VoiceBench, and GPQA all within $0.4$ points of the original model. Beyond the training distribution, ParaBridge generalizes to unseen paralinguistic cues, transfers from safety-oriented training to empathy-oriented dialogue, and works on a different SLM backbone.