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Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Mental health resources available via websites and mobile apps provide support such as advice, journaling, and elements from cognitive behavioral therapy. The proliferation of spoken conversational agents, such as Alexa, Siri, and Google…
Building open domain conversational systems that allow users to have engaging conversations on topics of their choice is a challenging task. Alexa Prize was launched in 2016 to tackle the problem of achieving natural, sustained, coherent…
While Alexa can perform over 100,000 skills on paper, its capability covers only a fraction of what is possible on the web. To reach the full potential of an assistant, it is desirable that individuals can create skills to automate their…
Home robots intend to make their users lives easier. Our work assists in this goal by enabling robots to inform their users of dangerous or unsanitary anomalies in their home. Some examples of these anomalies include the user leaving their…
Children increasingly have access to Large Language Models (LLMs), which may expose them to responses that are developmentally inappropriate or require age-sensitive safety, guidance, and boundaries. Existing LLM safety evaluations largely…
Autonomous agents trained via reinforcement learning present numerous safety concerns: reward hacking, negative side effects, and unsafe exploration, among others. In the context of near-future autonomous agents, operating in environments…
Voice-based systems like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, along with the growing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, serve diverse populations, including visually impaired and low-literacy communities.…
Many companies, including Google, Amazon, and Apple, offer voice assistants as a convenient solution for answering general voice queries and accessing their services. These voice assistants have gained popularity and can be easily accessed…
Conversational agents, such as chatbots, have increasingly found their way into many dimensions of our lives, including entertainment and education. In this exploratory study we built a child-friendly chatbot, "Ask Me Anything" (AMA), and…
This paper explores the application of artificial intelligence techniques in audio and voice processing, focusing on the integration of wake words and speaker recognition for secure access in embedded systems. With the growing prevalence of…
With the rapid advancement of conversational and diffusion-based AI, there is a growing adoption of AI in educational services, ranging from grading and assessment tools to personalized learning systems that provide targeted support for…
Generative AI systems are increasingly embedded in everyday life, yet empirical understanding of how psychological risk associated with AI use emerges, is experienced, and is regulated by users remains limited. We present a large-scale…
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.…
Mobile gaming apps are woven into children's daily lives. Given their ongoing cognitive and emotional development, children are especially vulnerable and depend on designs that safeguard their well-being. When apps feature manipulative…
In this work, we address a novel, but potentially emerging, problem of discriminating the natural human voices and those played back by any kind of audio devices in the context of interactions with in-house voice user interface. The tackled…
The rapid and wide-scale adoption of AI to generate human speech poses a range of significant ethical and safety risks to society that need to be addressed. For example, a growing number of speech generation incidents are associated with…
Risk assessment algorithms are being adopted by public sector agencies to make high-stakes decisions about human lives. Algorithms model "risk" based on individual client characteristics to identify clients most in need. However, this…
Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of social conversation as well as free-form conversation over a broad range of domains and topics. To advance the state of the art in conversational…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…