Related papers: Just ASK: Building an Architecture for Extensible …
Popular conversational agents frameworks such as Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Google Actions (gActions) offer unprecedented opportunities for facilitating the development and deployment of voice-enabled AI solutions in various verticals.…
Training a spoken language understanding system, as the one in Alexa, typically requires a large human-annotated corpus of data. Manual annotations are expensive and time consuming. In Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) user experience with the skill…
Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices have voice user interfaces (VUIs). One of the most popular VUIs is Amazon's Alexa, which supports more than 47,000 third-party applications ("skills"). We study how Alexa's integration of these skills…
Third-party software, or skills, are essential components in Smart Personal Assistants (SPA). The number of skills has grown rapidly, dominated by a changing environment that has no clear business model. Skills can access personal…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are a core component of voice assistants (VA), such as Alexa, Bixby, and Google Assistant. In this paper, we introduce a pipeline designed to extend SLU systems to new languages, utilizing Large…
While the English virtual assistants have achieved exciting performance with an enormous amount of training resources, the needs of non-English-speakers have not been satisfied well. Up to Dec 2021, Alexa, one of the most popular smart…
Conversational systems use spoken language to interact with their users. Although conversational systems, such as Amazon Alexa, are becoming common and afford interesting functionalities, there is little known about the issues users of…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is one of the core components of a task-oriented dialogue system, which aims to extract the semantic meaning of user queries (e.g., intents and slots). In this work, we introduce OpenSLU, an open-source…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are a crucial technology that is used today to design a wide variety of applications, most notably, smart assistants, such as Alexa. ASR systems are essentially dialogue systems that employ Spoken…
As Automatic Speech Processing (ASR) systems are getting better, there is an increasing interest of using the ASR output to do downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, there are few open source toolkits that can be used…
We consider the problem of performing Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) on small devices typical of IoT applications. Our contributions are twofold. First, we outline the design of an embedded, private-by-design SLU system and show that…
Machine unlearning, the process of efficiently removing specific information from machine learning models, is a growing area of interest for responsible AI. However, few studies have explored the effectiveness of unlearning methods on…
The Athena Startup Kit (ASK), is an interactive front-end to the Atlas software framework (ATHENA). Written in python, a very effective "glue" language, it is build on top of the, in principle unrelated, code repository, build,…
Voice assistants are deployed widely and provide useful functionality. However, recent work has shown that commercial systems like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are vulnerable to voice-based confusion attacks that exploit design issues. We…
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) plays a crucial role in speech-centric multimedia applications, enabling machines to comprehend spoken language in scenarios such as meetings, interviews, and customer service interactions. SLU…
Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit self-disclosure to support a wide variety of cooperative tasks. When applied to conversational UIs, active listening from machines can also…
The home voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa have become increasingly popular due to many interesting voice-activated services provided through special applications called skills. These skills, though useful, have also introduced new…
End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) predicts intent directly from audio using a single model. It promises to improve the performance of assistant systems by leveraging acoustic information lost in the intermediate textual…
Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…
Recent voice assistants are usually based on the cascade spoken language understanding (SLU) solution, which consists of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine and a natural language understanding (NLU) system. Because such approach…