Jaco: An Offline Running Privacy-aware Voice Assistant
This addresses privacy concerns for users of voice assistants, though it appears incremental by combining and extending existing approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of privacy risks in cloud-based voice assistants by introducing Jaco, an offline voice assistant that runs on low-resource devices like RaspberryPi while maintaining competitive performance and supporting multiple languages.
With the recent advance in speech technology, smart voice assistants have been improved and are now used by many people. But often these assistants are running online as a cloud service and are not always known for a good protection of users' privacy. This paper presents the architecture of a novel voice assistant, called Jaco, with the following features: (a) It can run completely offline, even on low resource devices like a RaspberryPi. (b) Through a skill concept it can be easily extended. (c) The architectural focus is on protecting users' privacy, but without restricting capabilities for developers. (d) It supports multiple languages. (e) It is competitive with other voice assistant solutions. In this respect the assistant combines and extends the advantages of other approaches.