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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…
This paper presents a self-supervised method for visual detection of the active speaker in a multi-person spoken interaction scenario. Active speaker detection is a fundamental prerequisite for any artificial cognitive system attempting to…
The next step for intelligent dialog agents is to escape their role as silent bystanders and become proactive. Well-defined proactive behavior may improve human-machine cooperation, as the agent takes a more active role during interaction…
Dialogue technologies such as Amazon's Alexa have the potential to transform the healthcare industry. However, current systems are not yet naturally interactive: they are often turn-based, have naive end-of-turn detection and completely…
Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as…
As conversational AI systems become more realistic and widely deployed, users are increasingly uncertain about whether they are interacting with a human or an AI system. When AI identity is unclear, users may unwittingly share sensitive…
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…
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…
Developing human-like conversational agents is a prime area in HCI research and subsumes many tasks. Predicting listener backchannels is one such actively-researched task. While many studies have used different approaches for backchannel…
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…
Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a…
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…
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…
This paper investigates the implementation of voice-enabled Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa on Raspberry Pi. Virtual Assistants are being a new trend in how we interact or do computations with physical devices. A voice-enabled system…
Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversational and voice assistants. Yet, there have been remarkably few developments in terms of the actual privacy offered by these devices. But how much of this is due to the…
There has been an increased focus on creating conversational open-domain dialogue systems in the spoken dialogue community. Unlike traditional dialogue systems, these conversational systems cannot assume any specific information need or…
In the IoT world, intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) is a popular service to interact with users based on voice command. For optimal performance and efficient data management, famous IVAs like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant usually…
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…
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.…
The popularity and projected growth of in-home smart speaker assistants, such as Amazon's Echo, has raised privacy concerns among consumers and privacy advocates. Notable questions regarding the collection and storage of user data by…