By: Mattew Littlefield

AI assistants like Alexa and Siri are listening to you constantly. These devices use ASR (automated–speech–recognition) to translate sound waves into text and can even predict what you want to say or do in the future just based on your voice. People are concerned about their privacy and start building voice-camouflage algorithms to protect their privacy.

AI assistants can be very helpful in answering your questions and entertaining you with whatever music you like but it’s also very dangerous in invading your privacy. ASR can eavesdrop and gather information about your identity, your age, your gender, your emotional state, your personality, and even your culture. They can even sell voice information to others.

In order to safeguard their privacy, people decided to create a voice camouflage device to confuse the AI assistants so they can not intrude on people’s privacy completely. Mia Chiquier, a graduate student at Columbia university that studies computer science, helped with creating the device.

The voice camouflage device is still in the developing stage but we hope it will come out soon.