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As social robots get more deeply integrated intoour everyday lives, they will be expected to engage in meaningful conversations and exhibit socio-emotionally intelligent listening behaviors when interacting with people. Active listening and…
Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used, and shared by…
Smart home devices have found their way through people's homes as well as hearts. One such smart device is Amazon Alexa. Amazon Alexa is a voice-controlled application that is rapidly gaining popularity. Alexa was primarily used for…
With the release of Amazon Alexa and the first Amazon Echo device, the company revolutionised the smart home. It allowed their users to communicate with, and control, their smart home ecosystem purely using voice commands. However, this…
Online Digital Assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri are very popular and provide a range or services to their users, a key function is their ability to satisfy user information needs from the sources available to…
Augmented reality devices have the potential to enhance human perception and enable other assistive functionalities in complex conversational environments. Effectively capturing the audio-visual context necessary for understanding these…
With over 20 million units sold since 2015, Amazon Echo, the Alexa-enabled smart speaker developed by Amazon, is probably one of the most widely deployed Internet of Things consumer devices. Despite the very large installed base,…
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…
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 popularity of voice-controlled smart speakers with intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) like the Amazon Echo and their increasing use as an interface for other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in the home provides opportunities…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
We have seen significant advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the 21st century. It has enabled a new technology where we can have a human-like conversation with the machines. The most significant use of this…
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…
In human conversation, empathic dialogue requires nuanced temporal cues indicating whether the conversational partner is paying attention. This type of "active listening" is overlooked in the design of Conversational Agents (CAs), which use…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been used as an effective means to study emergent communication between agents, yet little focus has been given to continuous acoustic communication. This would be more akin to human language…