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Voice plays an important role in our lives by facilitating communication, conveying emotions, and indicating health. Therefore, tracking vocal interactions can provide valuable insight into many aspects of our lives. This paper presents our…
Assistive technologies increasingly support independence, accessibility, and safety for older adults, people with disabilities, and individuals requiring continuous care. Two major categories are virtual assistive systems and robotic…
In an age of voice-enabled technology, voice anonymization offers a solution to protect people's privacy, provided these systems work equally well across subgroups. This study investigates bias in voice anonymization systems within the…
In speaker anonymization, speech recordings are modified in a way that the identity of the speaker remains hidden. While this technology could help to protect the privacy of individuals around the globe, current research restricts this by…
With the development of smart devices, such as the Amazon Echo and Apple's HomePod, speech data have become a new dimension of big data. However, privacy and security concerns may hinder the collection and sharing of real-world speech data,…
The pervasive use of smart speakers has raised numerous privacy concerns. While work to date provides an understanding of user perceptions of these threats, limited research focuses on how we can mitigate these concerns, either through…
As users increasingly rely on cloud-based computing services, it is important to ensure that uploaded speech data remains private. Existing solutions rely either on server-side methods or focus on hiding speaker identity. While these…
The goal of voice anonymization is to modify an audio such that the true identity of its speaker is hidden. Research on this task is typically limited to the same English read speech datasets, thus the efficacy of current methods for other…
Voice assistants have recently achieved remarkable commercial success. However, the current generation of these devices is typically capable of only reactive interactions. In other words, interactions have to be initiated by the user, which…
Voice control in the smart home is commonplace, enabling the convenient control of smart home Internet of Things hubs, gateways and devices, along with information seeking dialogues. Cloud-based voice assistants are used to facilitate the…
Open source is the future of technology. This community is growing by the day; developing and improving existing frameworks and software for free. Open source replacements are coming up for almost all proprietary software nowadays. This…
How are AI assistants being used in the real world? While model providers in theory have a window into this impact via their users' data, both privacy concerns and practical challenges have made analyzing this data difficult. To address…
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…
Since Siri's release in 2011 there have been a growing number of AI-driven domestic voice assistants that are increasingly being integrated into devices such as smartphones and TVs. But as their presence has expanded, a range of ethical…
Robotic process automation (RPA) has emerged as the leading approach to automate tasks in business processes. Moving away from back-end automation, RPA automated the mouse-click on user interfaces; this outside-in approach reduced the…
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…
The Japanese notion of "kawaii" or expressions of cuteness, vulnerability, and/or charm is a global cultural export. Work has explored kawaii-ness as a design feature and factor of user experience in the visual appearance, nonverbal…
Voice authentication has undergone significant changes from traditional systems that relied on handcrafted acoustic features to deep learning models that can extract robust speaker embeddings. This advancement has expanded its applications…
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 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…