Mind the Accent Gap: British Accent Robustness in Speech-Driven Financial Voice Assistants
Aadam Haq, Oggi Rudovic, Malcolm Chadwick, Jay Rainey, Shucong Zhang, Ricardo Guerrero, Sourav Bhattacharya, Maja Pantic
Abstract
AI voice assistants often use Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with LLM-based reasoning, yet existing systems struggle with regional British accents, including Scottish, Irish, and Welsh accents, since most ASR models are trained predominantly on American English voice data. Consequently, errors can carry through to the LLM stage, corrupting tool-call arguments and producing wrong or missing responses, which is especially costly in finance. Deployable ASR must also meet tight latency and memory budgets, making an accent-robust model choice even harder. We introduce CavaBench, the first internally collected benchmark of spoken financial queries, and use it to evaluate a range of ASR models and their end-to-end ASR-LLM pipeline behaviour across self-reported British accents. We find that WER strongly predicts downstream tool-calling accuracy ($r = -0.93$) but can fail to reflect task-level performance, with accent-related failures varying substantially across models and acoustic conditions. These findings guide the design of more inclusive, reliable voice-based financial assistants.