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Virtual personal assistants (VPA) (e.g., Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) today mostly rely on the voice channel to communicate with their users, which however is known to be vulnerable, lacking proper authentication. The rapid growth of…
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…
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…
The Amazon Alexa marketplace is the largest Voice Personal Assistant (VPA) platform with over 100,000 voice applications (i.e., skills) published to the skills store. In an effort to maintain the quality and trustworthiness of voice-apps,…
Voice applications (voice apps) are a key element in Voice Assistant ecosystems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, as they provide assistants with a wide range of capabilities that users can invoke with a voice command. Most voice…
Voice Personal Assistants (VPA) have become a common household appliance. As one of the leading platforms for VPA technology, Amazon created Alexa and designed Amazon Kids for children to safely enjoy the rich functionalities of VPA and for…
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…
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…
Recent advances in voice synthesis, coupled with the ease with which speech can be harvested for millions of people, introduce new threats to applications that are enabled by devices such as voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home…
As voice-based Conversational Assistants (CAs), including Alexa, Siri, Google Home, have become commonly embedded in households, many children now routinely interact with Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. It is important to research…
Home Digital Voice Assistants (HDVAs) are getting popular in recent years. Users can control smart devices and get living assistance through those HDVAs (e.g., Amazon Alexa, Google Home) using voice. In this work, we study the insecurity of…
Voice Assistants (VA) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are quickly and seamlessly integrating into people's daily lives. The increased reliance on VA services raises privacy concerns such as the leakage of private conversations and…
Voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, or Apple's Siri, have become the primary (voice) interface in smart speakers that can be found in millions of households. For privacy reasons, these speakers analyze every sound in…
With the development of foundation AI technologies, task-executable voice assistants (VAs) have become more popular, enhancing user convenience and expanding device functionality. Android task-executable VAs are applications that are…
Conversational agents (CAs) embodied in speakers or chatbots are becoming very popular in some countries, and despite their adult-centred design, they have become part of children's lives, generating a need for children-centric trustworthy…
Determining how voice assistants should broker consent to share data with third party software has proven to be a complex problem. Devices often require users to switch to companion smartphone apps in order to navigate permissions menus for…
While computer systems that allow users to interact through conversational natural language (i.e., chatbots) have existed for many years, varying types of applications advertising AI companionship (e.g., Character AI, Replika) have…
The technology of Conversational AI has made significant advancements over the last eighteen months. As a consequence, conversational agents are likely to be deployed in the near future that are designed to pursue targeted influence…
We present Alexa versus Alexa (AvA), a novel attack that leverages audio files containing voice commands and audio reproduction methods in an offensive fashion, to gain control of Amazon Echo devices for a prolonged amount of time. AvA…
AI chatbots are widely used by children and teens today, but they pose significant risks to youth's privacy and safety due to both increasingly personal conversations and potential exposure to unsafe content. While children under 13 are…