$\tau$-Elicitation: Benchmarking multi-turn entity extraction in voice agents
TL;DR
A 200-task voice benchmark spanning 10 entity types, controlled difficulty, caller realisms, and three environments is introduced, identifying strategy selection and successful recovery as the central bottlenecks in exact spoken entity collection.
Abstract
Voice agents often need to collect names, addresses, identifiers, dates, and times exactly, yet end-to-end benchmarks obscure where capture fails. We introduce $\tau$-Elicitation, a 200-task voice benchmark spanning 10 entity types, controlled difficulty, caller realisms, and three environments. A matched text agent passes all tasks, but four voice configurations achieve robust exact success from 0.14 to 0.41. Agents increase verification for hard and unfamiliar entities and sometimes for incorrect captures, but not for their weakest caller voice; only 24 to 37 percent of verified errors are repaired. A scaffold that prescribes spelling, read-back, correction, and confirmation raises robust Pass$^3$ by 14 to 31 points, at a cost of 21 to 28 seconds per call. Realisms such as spelling variations and restarts do not detectably affect exact success; mispronunciation increases repair effort. These results identify strategy selection and successful recovery as the central bottlenecks in exact spoken entity collection.
