Why Are Conversational Assistants Still Black Boxes? The Case For Transparency

TY - CHAP

T1 - Why Are Conversational Assistants Still Black Boxes? The Case For Transparency

AU - Huynh, Dong

AU - Seymour, William

AU - Moreau, Luc

AU - Such, Jose

N1 - Funding Information: This work is funded by the Secure AI Assistants project via Grant EP/T026723/1 from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Owner/Author.

PY - 2023/7/19

Y1 - 2023/7/19

N2 - Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversa- tional 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 technical and design limitations of speech as an interaction modality? In this paper, we set out to re- frame the discussion on why commercial conversational assistants do not offer meaningful privacy and transparency by demonstrating how they could. By instrumenting the open-source voice assistant Mycroft to capture audit trails for data access, we demonstrate how such functionality could be integrated into big players in the sector like Alexa and Google Assistant. We show that this problem can be solved with existing technology and open standards and is thus fundamentally a business decision rather than a technical limitation.

AB - Much has been written about privacy in the context of conversa- tional 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 technical and design limitations of speech as an interaction modality? In this paper, we set out to re- frame the discussion on why commercial conversational assistants do not offer meaningful privacy and transparency by demonstrating how they could. By instrumenting the open-source voice assistant Mycroft to capture audit trails for data access, we demonstrate how such functionality could be integrated into big players in the sector like Alexa and Google Assistant. We show that this problem can be solved with existing technology and open standards and is thus fundamentally a business decision rather than a technical limitation.

KW - conversational assistants

KW - voice assistants

KW - provenance

KW - audit trails

KW - personal data

KW - Mycroft

KW - privacy

KW - transparency

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85167813718&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3571884.3604319

DO - 10.1145/3571884.3604319

M3 - Poster abstract

T3 - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, CUI 2023

BT - ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI)

ER -