$\tau$-Bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains

τ-bench 2.0

τ-bench 2.0 adds τ-i18n (also called τ-multi): the same customer-service tasks in six languages, in text and in full-duplex voice, plus post-hoc judges for how the agent speaks.

What's new:

• Six languages. --language selects a language pack: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Chinese and Korean. Each pack localizes the tasks, the database and the caller personas for airline, retail and telecom.
• Voice in every language. Full-duplex voice runs with realtime agents (OpenAI, Gemini, xAI and others) against a simulated caller who speaks the language.
• New intake domain (τ-Entity): capturing names, addresses and other entities exactly on an outbound call, over 200 tasks. See τ-Entity.
• banking_knowledge in voice. The retrieval domain from v1.0 now also runs as a custom voice run (--audio-native --benchmark none).
• Judges. tau2 judges scores naturalness, speech fidelity, tool use and language-specific checks after a run. Judges do not change the task reward.
• Released benchmarks. Frozen task sets with pinned data, so runs can be checked and compared.

The benchmarks

Benchmark	Mode	Cells	Calls at 1 trial	Run with
text-v1	text	6 languages × 3 domains	900	tau2 run --benchmark text
voice-v2 (τ-i18n)	voice	6 languages × 3 domains	900	tau2 run --audio-native
voice-v1	voice	English × 3 domains	278	tau2 run --audio-native --benchmark voice-v1

The domains are airline, retail and telecom. text-v1 and voice-v2 use the same 50 frozen tasks per domain in every language. voice-v1 is the English-only frame of the current English voice leaderboard (50 airline, 114 retail, 114 telecom tasks). See the glossary for cell, frame and the other terms used in these docs.

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/sierra-research/tau2-bench
cd tau2-bench
uv sync --extra voice          # drop --extra voice for text only
cp .env.example .env           # add OPENAI_API_KEY (and voice keys for voice)

Text benchmark:

tau2 run --benchmark text --agent-llm openai/gpt-5.5 \
  --agent-llm-args '{"reasoning_effort":"low"}' --save-to text-run --dry-run

Voice benchmark (create your own caller voices first; the shipped voice IDs are Sierra-internal):

python -m tau2.voice.scripts.setup_voices --language all   # prints TAU2_VOICE_ID_... lines for .env
tau2 run --audio-native --audio-native-model gpt-realtime-2 \
  --reasoning-effort minimal --save-to voice-run --dry-run

--dry-run prints the plan without making calls. Remove it to run, then:

tau2 view --file data/simulations/voice-run      # scores and calls
tau2 judges suite data/simulations/voice-run     # judges (needed for a voice-v2 submission)

Add --domain retail --num-tasks 2 for a 12-call smoke test. Full details: Running the benchmark and the submission guide.

Comparing with v1.0.1

2.0 English runs are not input-identical to v1.0.1, so 2.0 scores are not comparable with the 1.x leaderboard. The differences:

• English retail and telecom each use 50 reviewed task replacements.
• The prompts add a language clause and an entity-order rule (keep multi-part values such as addresses in the task's order).
• The text user simulator gets a persona block.
• Communication checks use a semantic LLM judge instead of substring matching.
• The NL-assertion judge is gpt-5.4-mini-2026-03-17 (was gpt-4.1).
• Name, ID and phone lookups fold case, accents and formatting.
• Voice defaults: user simulator gpt-5.5 (was gpt-4.1), a 2400-second call limit (was 1200) and agent voice marin (was alloy).

For scores comparable to the 1.x leaderboard, use the v1.0.1 release. 1.x and 2.0 results are shown on separate leaderboard tabs, and 1.x submissions are still accepted. The full list is in the CHANGELOG.

Previous release: τ³-bench (v1.0)

τ³-bench added voice full-duplex evaluation, the banking_knowledge domain and 75+ task fixes: τ-Voice paper · τ-Knowledge paper · task fixes paper · v1.0.0 release notes. v1.0.1 fixed banking_knowledge grading; results from before 1.0.1 are not comparable on that domain (see the CHANGELOG).

Upgrading from τ²-bench? Installation uses uv instead of pip install -e ., and Python >=3.12, <3.14 is required.

Overview

$\tau$-bench is a simulation framework for evaluating customer service agents across multiple domains. It supports text-based half-duplex (turn-based) evaluation and voice full-duplex (simultaneous) evaluation using real-time audio APIs.

Each domain specifies:

• A policy that the agent must follow
• A set of tools that the agent can use
• A set of tasks to evaluate the agent's performance
• Optionally: a set of user tools for the user simulator

Available domains: mock · airline · retail · telecom · banking_knowledge · intake

τ-Entity uses --domain intake to evaluate exact entity capture in outbound calls over 200 tasks. Agent-directed elicitation is the default; --elicitation-strategy scaffolded selects the scaffolded ablation.

Mode	Description
Text (half-duplex)	Turn-based chat with tool use
Voice (full-duplex)	End-to-end audio via realtime providers (OpenAI, Gemini, xAI)

[!NOTE] τ-i18n was previously called τ-Multilingual, and τ-Entity was previously called τ-Elicitation. Only the names changed: the old names remain in technical identifiers, provenance and paper titles, and the τ-Entity domain is still intake.

Installation and a first custom run

1. Install

git clone https://github.com/sierra-research/tau2-bench
cd tau2-bench
uv sync                        # core, including scaffolded intake text runs

Optional extras (install what you need):

uv sync --extra voice          # + voice/audio-native features
uv sync --extra knowledge      # + banking_knowledge domain (retrieval pipeline)
uv sync --extra gym            # + gymnasium RL interface
uv sync --extra dev            # + pytest, ruff, pre-commit (required for contributing)
uv sync --all-extras           # everything

This requires uv. Voice features also need system dependencies (brew install portaudio ffmpeg on macOS). See the full installation guide for details.

2. Set up API keys

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env with your API keys (uses LiteLLM — any supported provider works)

3. Run an evaluation

tau2 run --domain airline --agent-llm gpt-4.1 --user-llm gpt-4.1 \
  --num-trials 1 --num-tasks 5

Results are saved to data/simulations/. Use tau2 view to browse them.

Tip: Run tau2 intro for an overview of available domains, commands, and examples.

Documentation

Getting Started

Document	Description
Getting Started	Installation, API keys, first run, output structure, configuration
Running the benchmark	Text and voice benchmark commands, defaults, results layout, resume, scoring and judges
Submission guide	Submitting text-v1, voice-v2, voice-v1 and 1.x results
Glossary	Pack, cell, frame, binding revision, pin, trial, judge, manifest
CLI Reference	Every tau2 command's --help, generated from the CLI

Core Concepts

Document	Description
Agent Developer Guide	Build and evaluate your own agent
Domains	Domain structure, data format, and available domains
Orchestrator & Communication Modes	Half-duplex and full-duplex orchestration
Task Schema & Evaluation	What evaluation_criteria.actions means, how reward_basis gates the reward, and how to inspect action correctness

Languages and judges

Document	Description
Language packs	What a language pack contains and how runs resolve it
Adding a language	The tau2 factory authoring workflow
Judge validation	Production judges, and authoring and validating new ones
τ-Entity	The intake domain and its strategies

Knowledge Retrieval

Document	Description
Knowledge Retrieval	Retrieval pipeline configs, embeddings, RAG, and sandbox setup for the banking_knowledge domain

Voice & Audio

Document	Description
Voice (Full-Duplex)	Providers, speech complexity, CLI options, and output structure for voice evaluation
Audio Native Architecture	Internal architecture for adding or modifying realtime provider adapters

RL & Training

Document	Description
Gym Interface	Gymnasium-compatible environment, play mode, train/test splits

Leaderboard & Experiments

Document	Description
Submission guide	How to submit results to taubench.com
Experiments	Experimental features and research code

Project

Document	Description
Contributing	How to contribute to τ-bench
Changelog	Version history and release notes

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Whether you're fixing bugs, adding features, creating domains, or contributing research code, see our Contributing Guide for guidelines.

Citation

If you use a specific component of $\tau^3$-bench, please cite the corresponding paper below.

Knowledge Domain (banking_knowledge)

@article{shi2026tau,
  title={$\tau$-Knowledge: Evaluating Conversational Agents over Unstructured Knowledge},
  author={Shi, Quan and Zytek, Alexandra and Razavi, Pedram and Narasimhan, Karthik and Barres, Victor},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.04370},
  year={2026}
}

Voice Full-Duplex Benchmark

@misc{ray2026tauvoicebenchmarkingfullduplexvoice,
      title={$\tau$-Voice: Benchmarking Full-Duplex Voice Agents on Real-World Domains},
      author={Soham Ray and Keshav Dhandhania and Victor Barres and Karthik Narasimhan},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2603.13686},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.SD},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13686},
}

Multilingual Voice Benchmark (τ-i18n)

@misc{ray2026taumultilingual,
      title={$\tau$-Multilingual: Benchmarking Voice Agents Across Languages},
      author={Soham Ray and Edgard dos Santos Paiva and Ruben Valenzuela and Karthik Narasimhan and Keshav Dhandhania and Victor Barres},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2609.35820},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35820},
}

Entity Capture Benchmark (τ-Entity, intake)

@misc{ray2026tauelicitation,
      title={$\tau$-Elicitation: Benchmarking Multi-Turn Entity Extraction in Voice Agents},
      author={Soham Ray and Victor Barres},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2609.13602},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13602},
}

Core $\tau$-Bench

@misc{barres2025tau2,
      title={$\tau^2$-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environment}, 
      author={Victor Barres and Honghua Dong and Soham Ray and Xujie Si and Karthik Narasimhan},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2506.07982},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07982}, 
}

@misc{yao2024tau,
      title={$\tau$-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains}, 
      author={Shunyu Yao and Noah Shinn and Pedram Razavi and Karthik Narasimhan},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2406.12045},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12045}, 
}

Task Fixes

@inproceedings{cuadron2026saber,
      title={{SABER}: Small Actions, Big Errors {\textemdash} Safeguarding Mutating Steps in {LLM} Agents},
      author={Alejandro Cuadron and Pengfei Yu and Yang Liu and Arpit Gupta},
      booktitle={ICLR 2026 Workshop on Memory for LLM-Based Agentic Systems},
      year={2026},
      url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=En2z9dckgP},
}