Related papers: SkillBot: Identifying Risky Content for Children i…

In this study, we investigate the emerging threat of inaudible acoustic attacks targeting digital voice assistants, a critical concern given their projected prevalence to exceed the global population by 2024. Our research extends the…

We evaluate how effectively platform-level parental controls moderate a mainstream conversational assistant used by minors. Our two-phase protocol first builds a category-balanced conversation corpus via PAIR-style iterative prompt…

Since being launched in 2014, Alexa, Amazon's versatile cloud-based voice service, is now active in over 100 million households worldwide. Alexa's user-friendly, personalized vocal experience offers customers a more natural way of…

Growing up in an artificial intelligence-filled world, with Siri and Amazon Alexa often within arm's - or speech's - reach, could have significant impact on children. Conversational agents could influence how students anthropomorphize…

Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…

The flourishing ecosystem centered around voice personal assistants (VPA), such as Amazon Alexa, has led to the booming of VPA apps. The largest app market Amazon skills store, for example, hosts over 200,000 apps. Despite their popularity,…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly entering children's lives - through parent-driven adoption, schools, and peer networks - yet current AI ethics and safety research do not adequately address content-related risks specific to minors.…

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…

The popularity of smart-home assistant systems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home leads to a booming third-party application market (over 70,000 applications across the two stores). While existing works have revealed security issues in…

Over the last few years, YouTube Kids has emerged as one of the highly competitive alternatives to television for children's entertainment. Consequently, YouTube Kids' content should receive an additional level of scrutiny to ensure…

Smart toys have captured an increasing share of the toy market, and are growing ubiquitous in households with children. Smart toys are a subset of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, containing sensors, actuators, and/or artificial…

Currently, adaptive voice applications supported by voice assistants (VA) are very popular (i.e., Alexa skills and Google Home Actions). Under this circumstance, how to design and evaluate these voice interactions well is very important. In…

Since its inception in 2016, the Alexa Prize program has enabled hundreds of university students to explore and compete to develop conversational agents through the SocialBot Grand Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to build agents…

Following the recent release of various Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Conversation Agents (CAs), adolescents are increasingly using CAs for interactive knowledge discovery on sensitive topics, including mental and sexual health topics.…

Conversational Artificial Intelligence (CAI) systems and Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA), such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Home and Siri are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, including those of children, the implications of which is…

Conversational assistants process personal data and must comply with data protection regulations that require providers to be transparent with users about how their data is handled. Transparency, in a legal sense, demands preciseness,…

Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Home, and Microsoft's Cortana, are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives and successfully help users in various daily tasks, such as making phone calls or playing music. Yet,…

Conversational systems typically focus on functional tasks such as scheduling appointments or creating todo lists. Instead we design and evaluate SlugBot (SB), one of 8 semifinalists in the 2018 AlexaPrize, whose goal is to support casual…

To improve user experience, Alexa now allows users to consent to data sharing via voice rather than directing them to the companion smartphone app. While verbal consent mechanisms for voice assistants (VAs) can increase usability, they can…

The radical advances in telecommunications and computer science have enabled a myriad of applications and novel seamless interaction with computing interfaces. Voice Assistants (VAs) have become a norm for smartphones, and millions of VAs…