Quality-Controlled Reply and Summary Data for Post-Training Small Language Models in AI Call-Screening Agents
Abstract: Small language models have improved to the point where a phone can plausibly screen its own calls, answering on an absent owner's behalf without sending call content off the device, a privacy-respecting alternative to cloud call handling. Realizing that promise takes a model that can do two things well: reply within the owner's authority during the call, and afterward tell the owner what happened and what needs attention. Released small models do neither reliably - they raise unwarranted alarms about ordinary callers and write summaries that drop material conditions or report a caller's claims as fact - and real calls supply no reference replies or summaries to learn from. We construct supervision for both tasks from synthetic calls under an information-boundary constraint: a caller writer works from a private scenario brief, a reply writer sees only the conversation up to the current turn, and a summary writer sees the completed transcript. Separate model-based reviews of the full dialogue and the summary decide which calls enter training, yielding a corpus of 3,395 calls with 15,102 targets (11,707 reply, 3,395 summary). Training a single shared LoRA adapter on both tasks, we evaluate six models (0.6-4B parameters) before and after adaptation on 192 held-out calls. Reply qualification rises from 21-54% to 94-97% and summary qualification from 0-6% to 43-72%; all twelve paired gains (six models x two tasks) have bootstrap intervals above zero, and the summary gains hold in every source family. Because one model both screened the training data and scored the outputs, these rates measure agreement with that evaluator's standard rather than human acceptance, which a planned human study will test. After adaptation, coherence and naturalness failures nearly vanish, leaving grounding and usefulness - faithfully tracking who said what, under which conditions - as the remaining challenge.