Related papers: SkillScanner: Detecting Policy-Violating Voice App…

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…

Many households include children who use voice personal assistants (VPA) such as Amazon Alexa. Children benefit from the rich functionalities of VPAs and third-party apps but are also exposed to new risks in the VPA ecosystem. In this…

Voice assistants are deployed widely and provide useful functionality. However, recent work has shown that commercial systems like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are vulnerable to voice-based confusion attacks that exploit design issues. We…

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 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…

Voice Assistants (VA) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are quickly and seamlessly integrating into people's daily lives. The increased reliance on VA services raises privacy concerns such as the leakage of private conversations and…

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 applications (voice apps) are a key element in Voice Assistant ecosystems such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, as they provide assistants with a wide range of capabilities that users can invoke with a voice command. Most voice…

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…

Agent skills extend local AI agents, such as Claude Code or Open Claw, with additional functionality, and their popularity has led to the emergence of dedicated skill marketplaces, similar to app stores for mobile applications.…

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…

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…

OpenClaw's ClawHub marketplace hosts tens of thousands of community-contributed agent skills (49,592 in our 2026-04-04 snapshot), and recent audits report that 13-26% contain security vulnerabilities. Regex scanners miss obfuscated…

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…

Autonomous AI agents increasingly extend their capabilities through Agent Skills: modular filesystem packages whose SKILL.md files describe when and how agents should use them. While this design enables scalable, on-demand capability…

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…

AI agents can extend their capabilities at inference time by loading reusable skills into context, yet equipping an agent with too many skills, particularly irrelevant ones, degrades performance. As community-driven skill repositories grow,…

Agent skills are modular instruction packages that combine YAML metadata, natural language instructions, and embedded code, and they have reached 196K publicly available instances, yet no mechanism exists to detect clone relationships among…

This paper presents the design of the machine learning architecture that underlies the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) a large scale Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables developers to extend the…

The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them to become a general-purpose platform for tasks like playing music, accessing information, and controlling smart home devices. In order to maintain the quality of…