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 third-party skills and to protect children and other members of the public from inappropriate or malicious skills, platform providers have developed content policies and certification procedures that skills must undergo prior to public release. Unfortunately, research suggests that these measures have been ineffective at curating voice assistant platforms, with documented instances of skills with significant security and privacy problems. This provocation paper outlines how the underlying architectures of these platforms had turned skill certification into a seemingly intractable problem, as well as how current certification methods fall short of their full potential. We present a roadmap for improving the state of skill certification on contemporary voice assistant platforms, including research directions and actions that need to be taken by platform vendors. Promoting this change in domestic voice assistants is especially important, as developers of commercial and industrial assistants or other similar contexts increasingly look to these devices for norms and conventions.
翻译:语音助理的覆盖范围和功能日益扩大,使得他们能够成为玩音乐、获取信息和控制智能家用装置等任务的通用平台。为了保持第三方技能的质量,并保护儿童和其他公众免受不当或恶意技能的伤害,平台提供者制定了在公开发布之前必须具备技能的内容政策和认证程序。不幸的是,研究表明,这些措施在整理语音助理平台方面没有实效,有文件记载的具有重大安全和隐私问题的技能实例。这份挑衅性文件概述了这些平台的基本结构如何将技能认证变成一个看似棘手的问题,以及目前的认证方法如何不能充分发挥其潜力。我们提出了改进当代语音助理平台技能认证状况的路线图,包括平台供应商需要采取的研究方向和行动。促进国内语音助理的这种改变特别重要,因为商业和工业助理或其他类似环境的开发者越来越关注这些规范和公约工具。