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Main Authors: Ranjan, Sumit, Sharma, Sugandha, Abbas, Ubaid, Ail, Puneeth N
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07708
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author Ranjan, Sumit
Sharma, Sugandha
Abbas, Ubaid
Ail, Puneeth N
author_facet Ranjan, Sumit
Sharma, Sugandha
Abbas, Ubaid
Ail, Puneeth N
contents Voice interfaces are quickly becoming a common way for people to interact with AI systems. This also brings new security risks, such as prompt injection, social engineering, and harmful voice commands. Traditional security methods rely on converting speech to text and then filtering that text, which introduces delays and can ignore important audio cues. This paper introduces VoiceSHIELD-Small, a lightweight model that works in real time. It can transcribe speech and detect whether it is safe or harmful, all in one step. Built on OpenAI's Whisper-small encoder, VoiceSHIELD adds a mean-pooling layer and a simple classification head. It takes just 90-120 milliseconds to classify audio on mid-tier GPUs, while transcription happens at the same time. Tested on a balanced set of 947 audio clips, the model achieved 99.16 percent accuracy and an F1 score of 0.9865. At the default setting, it missed 2.33 percent of harmful inputs. Cross-validation showed consistent performance (F1 standard deviation = 0.0026). The paper also covers the model's design, training data, performance trade-offs, and responsible use guidelines. VoiceSHIELD is released under the MIT license to encourage further research and adoption in voice AI security.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07708
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VoiceSHIELD-Small: Real-Time Malicious Speech Detection and Transcription
Ranjan, Sumit
Sharma, Sugandha
Abbas, Ubaid
Ail, Puneeth N
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7; H.5.2; K.6.5
Voice interfaces are quickly becoming a common way for people to interact with AI systems. This also brings new security risks, such as prompt injection, social engineering, and harmful voice commands. Traditional security methods rely on converting speech to text and then filtering that text, which introduces delays and can ignore important audio cues. This paper introduces VoiceSHIELD-Small, a lightweight model that works in real time. It can transcribe speech and detect whether it is safe or harmful, all in one step. Built on OpenAI's Whisper-small encoder, VoiceSHIELD adds a mean-pooling layer and a simple classification head. It takes just 90-120 milliseconds to classify audio on mid-tier GPUs, while transcription happens at the same time. Tested on a balanced set of 947 audio clips, the model achieved 99.16 percent accuracy and an F1 score of 0.9865. At the default setting, it missed 2.33 percent of harmful inputs. Cross-validation showed consistent performance (F1 standard deviation = 0.0026). The paper also covers the model's design, training data, performance trade-offs, and responsible use guidelines. VoiceSHIELD is released under the MIT license to encourage further research and adoption in voice AI security.
title VoiceSHIELD-Small: Real-Time Malicious Speech Detection and Transcription
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7; H.5.2; K.6.5
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07708