Towards Energy-Efficient and Low-Latency Voice-Controlled Smart Homes: A Proposal for Offline Speech Recognition and IoT Integration

The smart home systems, based on AI speech recognition and IoT technology, enable people to control devices through verbal commands and make people's lives more efficient. However, existing AI speech recognition services are primarily deployed on cloud platforms on the Internet. When users issue a command, speech recognition devices like ``Amazon Echo'' will post a recording through numerous network nodes, reach multiple servers, and then receive responses through the Internet. This mechanism presents several issues, including unnecessary energy consumption, communication latency, and the risk of a single-point failure. In this position paper, we propose a smart home concept based on offline speech recognition and IoT technology: 1) integrating offline keyword spotting (KWS) technologies into household appliances with limited resource hardware to enable them to understand user voice commands; 2) designing a local IoT network with decentralized architecture to manage and connect various devices, enhancing the robustness and scalability of the system. This proposal of a smart home based on offline speech recognition and IoT technology will allow users to use low-latency voice control anywhere in the home without depending on the Internet and provide better scalability and energy sustainability.

A Novel Nuanced Conversation Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models in Mental Health

Understanding the conversation abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can help lead to its more cautious and appropriate deployment. This is especially important for safety-critical domains like mental health, where someone's life may depend on the exact wording of a response to an urgent question. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for evaluating the nuanced conversation abilities of LLMs. Within it, we develop a series of quantitative metrics developed from literature on using psychotherapy conversation analysis literature. While we ensure that our framework and metrics are transferable by researchers to relevant adjacent domains, we apply them to the mental health field. We use our framework to evaluate several popular frontier LLMs, including some GPT and Llama models, through a verified mental health dataset. Our results show that GPT4 Turbo can perform significantly more similarly to verified therapists than other selected LLMs. We conduct additional analysis to examine how LLM conversation performance varies across specific mental health topics. Our results indicate that GPT4 Turbo performs well in achieving high correlation with verified therapists in particular topics such as Parenting and Relationships. We believe our contributions will help researchers develop better LLMs that, in turn, will more positively support people's lives.