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arXiv · 2602.07036

MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs

Zien Sheikh Ali·Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti·Rabindra Nath Nandi·Shammur Absar Chowdhury·Firoj Alam
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Abstract

Audio large language models (AudioLLMs) enable instruction following over speech and general audio, but progress is limited by the scarcity of diverse, conversational, and instruction-aligned speech--text data. This gap is particularly pronounced for persona-grounded and dialectal interactions, where collecting real multi-speaker recordings remains costly and slow. We introduce MENASpeechBank, a reference speech bank comprising ~18K high-quality utterances from 124 speakers spanning multiple MENA countries, covering English, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and regional Arabic varieties. We develop a controllable data pipeline that (i) constructs persona profiles enriched with World Values Survey (WVS) inspired attributes, (ii) defines a taxonomy driven ~5Kconversational scenarios, (iii) matches personas to scenarios via semantic similarity, (iv) generates ~417K role-play conversations with an LLM where the user speaks as the persona and the assistant behaves as a helpful agent, and (v) produces speaker-conditioned user-turn audio (synthetic) from reference recordings to preserve speaker diversity. We evaluate synthetic and human recorded conversations and provide an analysis. We will make the MENASpeechBank available for the community.(\href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/MenaSpeechBank)

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Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Rabindra Nath Nandi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Firoj Alam. 2026-09-18. MENASpeechBank: A Reference Voice Bank with Persona-Conditioned Multi-Turn Conversations for AudioLLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07036

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