Fighting Voice Spam with a Virtual Assistant Prototype
Abstract
Mass robocalls affect millions of people on a daily basis. Unfortunately, most current defenses against robocalls rely on phone blocklists and are ineffective against caller ID spoofing. To enable the detection of spoofed robocalls, we propose a {\em virtual assistant} application that could be integrated on smartphones to automatically vet incoming calls. Similar to a human assistant, the virtual assistant can pick up an incoming call and screen it without user interruption to determine if the call is unwanted. Via a user study, we show that our virtual assistant is able to preserve the user experience of a typical phone call. At the same time, we show that our system can detect mass robocalls without negatively impacting legitimate callers.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2008.03554,
title = {Fighting Voice Spam with a Virtual Assistant Prototype},
author = {Sharbani Pandit and Jienan Liu and Roberto Perdisci and Mustaque Ahamad},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.03554},
year = {2020}
}