Smart speaker design and implementation with biometric authentication and advanced voice interaction capability

Advancements in semiconductor technology have reduced dimensions and cost while improving the performance and capacity of chipsets. In addition, advancement in the AI frameworks and libraries brings possibilities to accommodate more AI at the resource-constrained edge of consumer IoT devices. Sensors are nowadays an integral part of our environment which provide continuous data streams to build intelligent applications. An example could be a smart home scenario with multiple interconnected devices. In such smart environments, for convenience and quick access to web-based service and personal information such as calendars, notes, emails, reminders, banking, etc, users link third-party skills or skills from the Amazon store to their smart speakers. Also, in current smart home scenarios, several smart home products such as smart security cameras, video doorbells, smart plugs, smart carbon monoxide monitors, and smart door locks, etc. are interlinked to a modern smart speaker via means of custom skill addition. Since smart speakers are linked to such services and devices via the smart speaker user's account. They can be used by anyone with physical access to the smart speaker via voice commands. If done so, the data privacy, home security and other aspects of the user get compromised. Recently launched, Tensor Cam's AI Camera, Toshiba's Symbio, Facebook's Portal are camera-enabled smart speakers with AI functionalities. Although they are camera-enabled, yet they do not have an authentication scheme in addition to calling out the wake-word. This paper provides an overview of cybersecurity risks faced by smart speaker users due to lack of authentication scheme and discusses the development of a state-of-the-art camera-enabled, microphone array-based modern Alexa smart speaker prototype to address these risks.

Multi-Component Optimization and Efficient Deployment of Neural-Networks on Resource-Constrained IoT Hardware

The majority of IoT devices like smartwatches, smart plugs, HVAC controllers, etc., are powered by hardware with a constrained specification (low memory, clock speed and processor) which is insufficient to accommodate and execute large, high-quality models. On such resource-constrained devices, manufacturers still manage to provide attractive functionalities (to boost sales) by following the traditional approach of programming IoT devices/products to collect and transmit data (image, audio, sensor readings, etc.) to their cloud-based ML analytics platforms. For decades, this online approach has been facing issues such as compromised data streams, non-real-time analytics due to latency, bandwidth constraints, costly subscriptions, recent privacy issues raised by users and the GDPR guidelines, etc. In this paper, to enable ultra-fast and accurate AI-based offline analytics on resource-constrained IoT devices, we present an end-to-end multi-component model optimization sequence and open-source its implementation. Researchers and developers can use our optimization sequence to optimize high memory, computation demanding models in multiple aspects in order to produce small size, low latency, low-power consuming models that can comfortably fit and execute on resource-constrained hardware. The experimental results show that our optimization components can produce models that are; (i) 12.06 x times compressed; (ii) 0.13% to 0.27% more accurate; (iii) Orders of magnitude faster unit inference at 0.06 ms. Our optimization sequence is generic and can be applied to any state-of-the-art models trained for anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, robotics, voice recognition, and machine vision.