Speech2Grasp: Data-Efficient Transfer of Text-Conditioned Grasp Detection to Speech in Humanoid Robots

Abstract

Humanoid robots increasingly require multi-modal understanding for natural interaction with humans. Despite the prominence of vision-language models, they generally assume textual rather than the more natural speech inputs. In this paper, we investigate whether a well-established text-conditioned model can be transferred to speech in a data-efficient manner. Using ALBEF as a case study, we conduct diagnostic analyses showing that a lightweight MLP-based projector effectively adapts it to speech, while preserving semantic discrimination and robustness. Motivated by these findings, we introduce Speech2Grasp, a framework for data-efficient transfer of text-conditioned grasp detection to speech. Real-world humanoid robot experiments show that Speech2Grasp outperforms cascaded ASR-based pipeline, while reducing inference latency. Our findings suggest a practical paradigm for extending established text-conditioned systems to speech.