AURA: Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and Automated Tool Use in Voice-Driven Tasks

Despite advances in language and speech technologies, no open-source system enables full speech-to-speech, multiturn dialogue with integrated tool use and agentic reasoning. We introduce AURA (Agent for Understanding, Reasoning, and Automated Tool Use), the first open-source, speech-native assistant capable of completing complex, goal-driven tasks through dynamic tool invocation and multi-turn conversation. AURA combines open-weight ASR, TTS, and LLMs in a cascaded pipeline and supports tools such as calendar booking, contact lookup, web search, and email. Its modular design allows easy integration of new tools using natural language prompts and action classes. On VoiceBench, AURA scores $92.75 \%$ on Open-BookQA—outperforming all open-weight systems and nearing GPT-4o—and 4.39 on AlpacaEval, competitive with other openweight systems. Human evaluation shows $90 \%$ task success on complex, multi-turn speech tasks.