Adapting Smart Home Voice Assistants to Users’ Privacy Needs using a Raspberry-Pi based and Self-Adapting System

Through improvements of voice recognition smart voice assistants have become available in various forms. They offer users the possibility to control devices by natural voice interaction. To improve accuracy, user conversation data is automatically streamed to companies for machine learning. This is perceived as an act privacy invasion by many users. This is also an argument for potential buyers against acquiring a voice assistant device. Therefore, the central design element of smart home voice assistants should be local processing. For this purpose, the work was based on the Privacy by Design principles by Cavoukian. Based on the analysis of existing cloud and offline solutions a prototype was developed. Through complete offline modality features like self adapting commands and more natural forms of voice interaction were integrated. This was possible while protecting user privacy. Furthermore, fulfilment of the goals with focus on accuracy and quick response time was evaluated. This paper shows that it is possible to implement an offline voice assistant with similar response times and high accuracy. Self adaptation and expanded recognition show great potential for future improvements.