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Based on joint media engagement (JME) and parental mediation theory (PMT), this study conducted a textual and thematic analysis of 360 user-generated content videos to explore, in the family scenario, smart speaker use behavior between Chinese children and parents. The findings reveal the following: (a) smart speakers create a new JME model and new co-use scenarios; (b) the mediation strategy used by parents differs from the mediation strategies in traditional PMT; (c) smart speakers are social actors and play a mediating role in the construction of family relationships; and (d) smart speaker use behavior between parents and children is characterized by a return to the living room era, which creates a new family dynamic and a reshaping of family politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, end users can create routines for Amazon Echo and Google Nest devices using a companion app (Amazon Alexa and Google Home, respectively) running on smartphones. Our work explores the possibility of transferring this End-User Development activity directly to the smart speakers, with and without a touchscreen. To this aim, we designed and developed two Amazon Skills (one for Amazon Echo Show and the other for Amazon Echo Dot) and two Google Actions (one for Google Nest Hub and the other for Google Home Speaker). Then, we carried out two controlled experiments, involving 40 participants, to compare routine creation through multi-modal interaction (based on vision, speech, and touch) with routine creation through speech-only interaction. Driven by our research questions, we found that for routine creation the multi-modal interaction is preferred to the speech-only one and the perceived quality of interaction seems to depend on the brand of the smart speaker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customer perception is an important consideration factor in evaluating the quality of human-computer interaction services. Sustainable user experiences and marketing strategies can be created by analyzing customer perception. By understanding consumer satisfaction with product services in the customer perception area, appropriate product service failure prevention strategies can be formulated. A service failure evaluation model is proposed in this study, which considers the customer tolerance area to accurately evaluate consumers' behavioral experiences from purchasing to using products. The concept of tolerance area is introduced, and a combination of the fuzzy Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) method and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is used to construct a human-computer interaction service failure evaluation model. Potential service failure factors of smart speakers are accurately evaluated by this model, and these service failure factors are ranked within the tolerance area. The research identifies voice misinterpretation and signal connectivity issues as the primary risk factors impacting the quality of human-computer interaction for smart speakers. The application of this method not only enhances the evaluation of smart speaker human-computer interaction services quality but also aids in the precise identification and prioritization of critical failure modes. The proposed service failure prevention strategies can reduce consumer dissatisfaction and provide innovative references for smart product design and marketing. The findings bolster empirical evidence for service failure prevention strategies in smart products and pave the way for novel perspectives on enhancing the quality of human-computer interaction services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The domestication of smart artifacts has transformed our homes into hybrid environments of physical and digital worlds. It also has been changing our mindsets, behaviors, meaning attributions to, expectations from, frustrations about, and interactions with smart artifacts. By extension, the smartness definition is reconstructed by users who are the subject of smart artifact experiences. The current study is aimed at uncovering the user experience of smart artifacts with a focus on cognitive and emotional aspects to better understand what users expect when an artifact is identified as "smart." Therefore, an online research study is conducted to gain insight into the user experience of smart artifacts from content‐rich reviews on e‐commerce websites. Robot vacuum cleaners, smartwatches, and smart speakers were chosen as exemplary smart artifacts of the study. Because they offer different types of interaction with distinct aspects, our findings indicate that smartness is associated with trust in expertise, emotional engagement, exaggerated evaluation, and intriguing existence concepts about Emotional UX. In Cognitive UX, smartness relates to reducing mental workload, gratifying experience, perceived phenotype, reciprocal acquaintance, trust‐building experience, tailored situatedness, shaping sociality, physical competency, and dual enhancement concepts. These findings demonstrate the potential of conceptualization in the early stages of smart artifact design processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The usability of voice interaction is critical for consumers to have a satisfactory experience when interacting with voice-controlled smart products. However, voice interaction from the user's perspective is underresearched and there are no existing scales to measure voice-interaction usability. This study uses a mixed methods approach to explore the construct of voice-interaction usability and establish a scale that can be used for measuring it. We first developed voice-interaction usability dimensions based on user reviews by using a coding technique that stems from grounded theory and then set up a classification of voice-interaction usability with five dimensions and 13 subdimensions based on cooperative principle theory. After developing the multilevel dimensions, we collected and examined multiple rounds of survey data to develop and validate a voice-interaction usability scale. This study enhances cooperative principle theory by extending the four-principle framework, developing the subdimensions of the framework in the human-machine voice-interaction context, and operationalizing the dimension concepts by developing the associated scales. The voice-interaction usability scale not only contributes to research on users' behavior and experience with voice-controlled smart products but also provides insights to improve the design of voice-interaction functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: early detection of dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) have an utmost significance nowadays, and smart conversational agents are becoming more and more capable. DigiMoCA, an Alexa-based voice application for the screening of MCI, was developed and tested. Objective: to evaluate the acceptability and usability of DigiMoCA, considering the perception of end-users and cognitive assessment administrators, through standard evaluation questionnaires. Method: a sample of 46 individuals and 24 evaluators participated in this study. End-users were fairly heterogeneous considering demographic and neuro-psychological characteristics. Evaluators were mostly health and social care professionals, relatively well-balanced in terms of gender, career background and years of experience. Results: end-users acceptability ratings were generally positive (rating above 3 in a 5-point scale for all dimensions) and it improved significantly after the interaction with DigiMoCA. Administrators also rated the usability of DigiMoCA, with an average score of 5.86/7 and with high internal consistency (α = 0.95). Conclusion: although there is still room for improvement in terms of user satisfaction and voice interface, DigiMoCA is perceived as an acceptable, accessible and usable cognitive screening tool, both by individuals being tested and test administrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) are a valuable tool in language learning because they provide opportunities for authentic interaction. However, their effectiveness, compared with that of human interlocutors, in facilitating second and foreign language interaction has not been explored. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of IPAs (i.e. Google Assistant on smartphones) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' oral proficiency outside the classroom and the differences between IPA-human interaction and human-only interaction. A total of 89 college freshmen participated in an out-of-class program consisting of 10-minute sessions twice a week for one semester. The participants were randomly divided into three groups: (1) those who interacted with Google Assistant on smartphones; (2) those who interacted with L1 English speakers; and (3) those who interacted with L2 English speakers. Both quantitative (English oral proficiency tests) and qualitative data (focus group interviews) were collected and analyzed. The results revealed that the out-of-class use of Google Assistant significantly improved the EFL learners' oral proficiency, with a positive effect similar to that of interaction with L1 English speakers. A detailed analysis of the interviews revealed that the mobility and ubiquity of Google Assistant exposed learners to a large amount of high-quality oral input, provided opportunities to practice speaking with immediate, multimodal feedback, engaged learners through various modes of interaction, eliminated learners' fear of making mistakes, reduced learners' anxiety in speaking English, and encouraged self-directed learning outside the classroom, which are all conducive to improving EFL learners' oral proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English speaking is considered the most difficult and anxiety-provoking language skill for EFL learners due to lack of access to authentic language use, fear of making mistakes, and peers' negative comments. With automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have potential in foreign language interaction applications. Further empirical research is required to validate the usefulness of IPA interactions in improving EFL speaking skills. Therefore, this study investigated the impact of IPAs, especially IPA feedback presentation mode, on adolescent EFL learners' speaking proficiency. A total of 88 ninth-grade EFL learners were recruited from three intact classes and randomly divided into two experimental groups (i.e., one using Google Home Hub with multimodal feedback and one using Google Home Mini with audio feedback only) and one control group (that interacted with a teacher and peers in a conventional classroom). Both quantitative (English speaking test results) and qualitative data (semi-structured interview responses) were collected and analyzed in the 10-week study. The results revealed that interacting with Google Assistant through Google Home Hub improved the adolescent EFL learners' speaking proficiency most markedly. Detailed analyses of the participants' interviews demonstrated that IPA-mediated interaction (1) added variety and enjoyment to EFL speaking, (2) expanded exposure to English and learner-centered speaking practice with immediate feedback, (3) offered greater authenticity and flexibility in interactions, and (4) encouraged peer collaboration. Furthermore, multimodal presentation of IPA feedback was superior to single-mode presentation in enhancing EFL speaking proficiency. The narration, on-screen text, and graphics were crucial to the EFL learners' successful interaction with the IPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sound-squatting is a squatting technique that exploits similarities in word pronunciation to trick users into accessing malicious resources. It is an understudied threat that has gained traction with the popularity of smart speakers and audio-only content, such as podcasts. The picture gets even more complex when multiple languages are involved. We here introduce X-squatter, a multi- and cross-language AI-based system that relies on a Transformer Neural Network for generating high-quality sound-squatting candidates. We illustrate the use of X-squatter by searching for domain name squatting abuse across hundreds of millions of issued TLS certificates, alongside other squatting types. Key findings unveil that approximately 15% of generated sound-squatting candidates have associated TLS certificates, well above the prevalence of other squatting types (7%). Furthermore, we employ X-squatter to assess the potential for abuse in PyPI packages, revealing the existence of hundreds of candidates within a 3-year package history. Notably, our results suggest that the current platform checks cannot handle sound-squatting attacks, calling for better countermeasures. We believe X-squatter uncovers the usage of multilingual sound-squatting phenomena on the Internet and it is a crucial asset for proactive protection against the threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become increasingly important within the smart home domain, making the security of the devices a critical aspect. The majority of IoT devices are black-box systems running closed and pre-installed firmware. This raises concerns about the trustworthiness of these devices, especially considering that some of them are shipped with a microphone or a camera. Remote attestation aims at validating the trustworthiness of these devices by verifying the integrity of the software. However, users cannot validate whether the attestation has actually taken place and has not been manipulated by an attacker, raising the need for HCI research on trust and understandability. We conducted a qualitative study with 35 participants, investigating trust in the attestation process and whether this trust can be improved by additional explanations in the application. We developed an application that allows users to attest a smart speaker using their smartphone over an audio channel to identify the attested device and observe the attestation process. In order to observe the differences between the applications with and without explanations, we performed A/B testing. We discovered that trust increases when additional explanations of the technical process are provided, improving the understanding of the attestation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advancements in Internet and communication technologies have facilitated the proliferation of product reviews and commentary pertaining to smart speakers. This study investigated the impacts of uncivil comments on blog comment credibility. Results show that the civil opinion commentary appears to be more credible than uncivil commentary. The interaction between civil opinion and low AI anxiety generates more blog review credibility than the interaction between uncivil opinion and low AI anxiety. Finally, we identify moderating effects of AI anxiety and provide deeper insights into how the interaction of comment civility and AI anxiety shape the credibility assessments of blog reviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has revealed the positive impact of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) on L2 learners' oral development and learning attitude. These studies, however, focused mostly on the in-class use of IPAs, with existing research on the out-of-class use being exploratory. To fill the gap of lacking empirical investigations on IPA-based autonomous second language learning (ASLL), this study recruited 34 college EFL learners to use Google Assistant (GA) in their respective homes for six weeks and examined their listening and speaking development afterwards. Each week, participants received an email about the new commands for them to explore, and half of them were additionally given sustained teacher guidance (i.e. weekly evaluation forms) on the usefulness of each command to better enhance their participation. Statistical analysis on the participants' learning gains demonstrated that participants receiving weekly evaluation forms made significant improvement in both listening and speaking skills, and they even outperformed those without weekly evaluation forms in their oral development. Nevertheless, there was no significant difference in the two groups' listening gains. These findings demonstrate that, with sustained teacher guidance, IPAs have great potential in L2 oral development in ASLL context, but more long-term studies on IPAs' impact for L2 listening should be conducted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore the unit of information and the size of the unit for designing a voice user interface. Through two experiments, this study investigated what form the information (the unit of information) should take and what size of that (the size of unit) should be when people were provided information by voice interfaces. Participants were presented with a task to recall (OX quiz) by listening to and remembering information (based on an encyclopedia) provided by smart speakers. In Experiment 1, it was revealed that participants stored information in their memory span on a sentence-by-sentences basis to determine how much information they could remember. In Experiment 2, sentence-based information was presented in various sizes, and participants evaluated 17 information units consisting of up to nine words as their memory limit. This information unit-based voice interface design could help improve users' memory performance and usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are at least two perspectives concerning the role of digital and connected media systems in relation to individual agency. One suggests that individuals have a gain in agency while using digital devices and services while other approaches see that users become dependent on tech companies that use data flows to analyse and manipulate user behaviour. In our paper, we want to examine empirically how those two descriptions of agency work out and relate to each other. We use conversation analysis of face-to-interface interactions with smart speakers and intelligent personal assistants to examine the agency in front of the device and we rely on interviews with smart-speaker users to understand the users' strategies to curtail the potentially unwanted effects of smart and connected devices and services. With reference to concepts of 'co-operative work' and 'cooperation without consensus' and a discussion of media and data practices, this paper elucidates how the two agencies of users and of device and service providers are intertwined and distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This community case study examined the potential benefits of smart speakers to tackle loneliness in the oldest old adults living in supported accommodation. The program was established as a collaboration between the supported accommodation provider and a technology company to explore the feasibility of smart speakers to alleviate resident loneliness. Loneliness in later life often accompanies a shrinking social circle, loss of a spouse or increased disability. People aged 85 years of age and over are increasingly likely to experience these life events, leading to an increased risk of social isolation and loneliness. Five older people, mean age 90 years of age, who resided in supported accommodation, were given a smart speaker for 8 weeks to examine their experience with the voice assistant. The experiences of the five older adults are explored as case studies, with each person interviewed both before and after receiving the smart speaker. All five valued their smart speaker, recognised its potential for tackling loneliness, and wanted to keep it. The three most lonely individuals reported that their smart speaker made them feel less lonely and isolated through two mechanisms: (i) creating a presence and (ii) having some control over their situation. Although only a small study, these experiences suggest providing smart speakers for lonely and isolated oldest-old people, could be one way to help combat loneliness in community settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated a speech-jamming device that uses modulated ultrasonic signals to jam hidden recording devices, as well as to avoid stealth injection of speech commands to smart speakers. Recordings are jammed using demodulated audible noise signals due to the non-linearities in analog circuits in the recording devices. Additionally, this ultrasonic signal should not be audible to humans to avoid unnecessary annoyance. We find that the effective modulation schemes for jamming seem to be highly device dependent, but frequency-modulated signals seem to work modestly well with the devices tested.We then created a prototype jamming device that creates a modulated ultrasonic jamming signal uniformly in the surrounding environment. The jamming signals were simultaneously output from the ultrasonic transducers placed on the dome-shaped shell of the prototype.We evaluated the jamming capability of this prototype by recording speech samples played out from a loudspeaker when jamming signals are simultaneously output from the prototype. It was confirmed that the prototype effectively lowers the intelligibility of the recorded speech samples uniformly in most of the surrounding area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing prevalence of smart devices spurs the development of emerging indoor localization technologies for supporting diverse personalized applications at home. Given marked drawbacks of popular chirp signal-based approaches, we aim at developing a novel device-free localization system via the continuous wave of the inaudible frequency. To achieve this goal, solutions are developed for fine-grained analyses, able to precisely locate moving human traces in the room-scale environment. In particular, a smart speaker is controlled to emit continuous waves at inaudible 20kHz, with a co-located microphone array to record their Doppler reflections for localization. We first develop solutions to remove potential noises and then propose a novel idea by slicing signals into a set of narrowband signals, each of which is likely to include at most one body segment's reflection. Different from previous studies, which take original signals themselves as the baseband, our solutions employ the Doppler frequency of a narrowband signal to estimate the velocity first and apply it to get the accurate baseband frequency, which permits a precise phase measurement after I-Q (i.e., in-phase and quadrature) decomposition. A signal model is then developed, able to formulate the phase with body segment's velocity, range, and angle. We next develop novel solutions to estimate the motion state in each narrowband signal, cluster the motion states for different body segments corresponding to the same person, and locate the moving traces while mitigating multi-path effects. Our system is implemented with commodity devices in room environments for performance evaluation. The experimental results exhibit that our system can conduct effective localization for up to three persons in a room, with the average errors of 7.49cm for a single person, with 24.06cm for two persons, with 51.15cm for three persons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the sonic and spatial configurations of the Spiritualist séance as a speculative antecedent to the presence of disembodied voices, such as Amazon's Alexa, in contemporary homes. I examine archival notes, photographs and audio recordings in order to unpack how séances curated domestic spaces in order to display and interrogate unseen agents. Further, I consider the presentation of the sound installation The Dark Age of Connectionism: Captivity (2017) by Wesley Goatley at IMPAKT festival, curated by the curatorial collective Haunted Machines, as a case study that demonstrates how the exhibition framework articulated in the séance room might be applied as critical strategy in gallery spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current limitations of user–product interaction with smart speakers have spurred the proposal of a model to circumvent these challenges. We used the ViP design principle to redefine the user's approach to interacting with the product. Throughout the deconstruction and design stages, we explored the structure and function of the conventional product across three layers: the product layer, interaction layer, and context layer using three models. We used the hierarchical analysis method to effectively quantify the design factors affecting user experience and identify the key design factors. This approach enabled us to contextualize the smart audio system, explore the interaction dynamics between the product and the user, and provide valuable insights on designing new products. A questionnaire method was used to survey 67 users, and a reliability test was conducted to ensure the validity of the questionnaire v (Cronbach's coefficient α = 0.868). A pairwise comparison of factors was conducted on a 1–9 scale, with weights determined through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The combination of the ViP design principle and hierarchical analysis presents a novel and objective paradigm to guide designers to customize product characteristics (design attributes) to enhance user human–computer interaction experience. We validated the feasibility of the innovative design approach using the smart speaker model, offering insights for research on designing similar products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversational agents (CAs) have recently become ubiquitous. Smart speakers, mobile phone voice assistants, and in-car voice assistants have entered our lives. Studies have examined some factors influencing the user experience (UX) of CAs. However, there is little research on CAs' reply design, especially when the information the users need is uncertain, which is regarded as an uncertain information scenario. The current research mainly focuses on measuring the UX with CAs' replies in uncertain information scenarios. We designed two reply strategies of CAs, namely, a further inquiry strategy and a list-style reply strategy, to improve UX in this kind of uncertain information scenario. Two studies were designed and conducted based on the E-prime platform to verify the effect of the two reply strategies on UX. In Study 1, we verified the influence of inquiry strategy with different address terms for users on UX. In Study 2, we verified the influence of the list-style reply strategy (explicit and implicit) on UX. The gender differences in the evaluation of the two reply strategies were also examined. The results showed that, in the uncertain information scenarios, the reply strategy of further inquiries received a higher UX evaluation than direct replies in Study 1. Moreover, male participants preferred the "master" address to the "nin" address. However, male participants had no significant preference for further inquiries. For male participants, there was no significant difference in the UX evaluations for the "master" address and "nin" address. List-style replies with ranking information received the highest UX ratings, followed by list-style replies without ranking information and direct replies in Study 2, indicating that users preferred the explicit reply design of CAs. In addition, we found that male participants tended to have a higher rating of CA replies for all reply methods than female participants in our studies, suggesting that women have higher expectations for the reply design of CAs. In general, these results may contribute to the design of CA replies and highlight the importance of personalizing CA language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of information technologies yields a promising market for information densely products, i.e. smart, connected products (SCPs) and also alters the way of user-designer interaction in the product design and development. Online review has become a convenient and efficient way to express customers' opinions and preferences on products they have bought. In order to identify and prioritise customer needs in the smartness connected era, this study proposes a novel textual data-driven and regret/rejoicing perception-based user preferences identification and priority framework for SCPs. We first dig customer needs and evaluations from online customer reviews, then design a new directional distance index-based approach to acquire user weights. Combining absolute and relative weights, we introduce an integrated approach to prioritise all customer preferences. Specially, absolute weights are obtained by an improved Borda method based on frequency and position information, while relative weights are determined through probabilistic linguistic-based regret/rejoicing decision-making method. Finally, an application of 12 kinds of smart speakers is constructed and discussed to illustrate the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed approach, and these corresponding results are helpful for smart design, development and improvement of SCPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on longitudinal qualitative research involving twenty families with at least one child aged eight or younger, the article provides an account of how families, as distinctive communicative figurations, adopt, use and make sense of smart speakers through diverse socially situated practices. Findings show that parents and children enter in a communicative relationship with smart speakers based on their attribution of human-like or machine-like traits to the device, and the device response to their expectations. Moreover, engaging in communicative practices through and with smart speakers, family members subvert or reinforce existing power relations. However, smart speakers acquire new agency by intensifying the datafication and algorithmification of everyday life, thus entailing a shift in power dynamics between humans and machines.

Voice-controlled systems have revolutionized user interactions, making technology more accessible and intuitive across various settings. In multi-user environments, such as households, voice assistants like Amazon Alexa are favored as they enable seamless interaction with devices and services. However, the convenience these systems offer comes with challenges, especially concerning privacy and security. In environments where multiple users interact with the same voice assistant, the need for sophisticated access control mechanisms becomes apparent to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive information. This study assesses the effectiveness of voice access control mechanisms within these multi-user contexts, shedding light on the inherent privacy risks associated with shared voice-controlled systems. First, the study demonstrates vulnerabilities in the current access control mechanisms concerning users’ private data. Second, a framework for automated testing is developed to explore the access control weaknesses and determine whether the accessible data is of consequence, as not all information may be equally sensitive or vital to users. Third, two flaws within the access control mechanisms offered by the voice system are identified, highlighting the susceptibility of existing access controls to unauthorized access. Finally, the study reveals that operations on the system are protected, whereas other operations that are not protected still reveal user’s private information. These findings underscore the need for enhanced privacy safeguards and improved access control systems in multi-user environments. Recommendations are offered to mitigate risks associated with unauthorized access, focusing on securing the user’s private data on the voice assistant.

AbstractWith the popularity of smart speakers, companionship has emerged as an important aspect of user experiences with these devices. While previous studies have primarily focused on users’ adoption and intentions for continuous AI product usage, only a limited number of qualitative studies have identified the nascent concept of digital companionship. However, these studies often lack a comprehensive elucidation of the underlying psychological motivations. Therefore, this study aims to explore how certain users perceive digital companionship within the context of smart speakers and elucidate the motivations driving these parasocial needs. Our investigation adopts a Human-Centered AI perspective for a deeper understanding. A survey was conducted, encompassing 460 valid questionnaires. The findings underscore the influence of user personality on their psychological perceptions of smart speakers. Specifically, extroverted and conscientious users tend to view smart speakers as sources of happiness, akin to “happiness goodies.” Conversely, other users tend to perceive the companionship of smart speakers less strongly, akin to “white elephants.” Notably, our research reveals that perceived attraction and intimacy jointly mediate the influence of user personality traits, including extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, on digital companionship. This study contributes to illustrating why AI-based products, such as smart speakers, could be regarded as friends by digital companionship. Furthermore, it holds practical implications for personalizing AI roles and building trustworthy AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heart rate is a key vital sign that can be used to understand an individual's health condition. Recently, remote sensing techniques, especially acoustic-based sensing, have received increasing attention for their ability to non-invasively detect heart rate via commercial mobile devices such as smartphones and smart speakers. However, due to signal interference, existing methods have primarily focused on monitoring a single user and required a large separation between them when monitoring multiple people. These limitations hinder many common use cases such as couples sharing the same bed or two or more people located in close proximity. In this paper, we present an approach that can minimize interference and thereby enable simultaneous heart rate monitoring of multiple individuals in close proximity using a commonly available smart speaker prototype. Our user study, conducted under various real-life scenarios, demonstrates the system's accuracy in sensing two users' heart rates when they are seated next to each other with a median error of 0.66 beats per minute (bpm). Moreover, the system can successfully monitor up to four people in close proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image source method (ISM) is often used to simulate room acoustics due to its ease of use and computational efficiency. The standard ISM is limited to simulations of room impulse responses between point sources and omnidirectional receivers. In this work, the ISM is extended using spherical harmonic directivity coefficients to include acoustic diffraction effects. These effects occur in practice when transducers are mounted on audio devices of finite spatial extent, e.g., modern smart speakers with loudspeakers and microphones. The proposed method is verified using finite element simulations of various loudspeaker and microphone configurations in a shoebox-shaped room. It is shown that the accuracy of the proposed method is related to the sizes, shapes, number, and positions of the devices inside a room. A simplified version of the proposed method, which can significantly reduce computational effort, is also presented. The proposed method and its simplified version can simulate room transfer functions more accurately than currently available image source methods and can aid the development and evaluation of speech and acoustic signal processing algorithms, including speech enhancement, acoustic scene analysis, and acoustic parameter estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a digital divide between senior adults and the general population because of the disparity in access and usage of digital technologies, including the internet and modern devices, often stemming from factors like age, familiarity, and socioeconomic status. Yet, technology is increasingly penetrating the healthcare sector in areas such as screening, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up. This study focuses on investigating how older adults perceive the introduction of new devices in the screening and diagnosis of cognitive impairment. For this, a perception study was carried out involving 25 senior adults, 16 women and 9 men, aged between 60 and 93 years, living in the Vigo area, Spain. First, the perception and acceptability of popular technological devices were evaluated by means of the technology acceptance model. Then, participants' perceptions about the use of smart speakers and tablets for cognitive evaluation were analyzed, both before and after interacting with such devices. Finally, the perception of their caregivers about these tools was also studied. These instruments were found to be useful and enjoyable by older adults. More specifically, smart speakers were preferred by participants over traditional tests for detecting cognitive decline. Additionally, there were no significant differences in the perception of utility, ease of use, or enjoyment between tablets and smart speakers. Participants' caregivers also reported an overall positive perception about the introduction of these new tools for cognitive assessment. In any case, the study provided evidence to support the introduction of both tablets and smart speakers to interact with older adults, and more specifically, as a means to facilitate the early detection and screening of cognitive decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is estimated that one in three women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) across the course of their life. The popular uptake of “smart speakers” powered by sophisticated AI means that surveillance of the domestic environment is increasingly possible. Correspondingly, there are various proposals to use smart speakers to detect or report IPV. In this paper, we clarify what might be possible when it comes to combatting IPV using existing or near-term technology and also begin the project of evaluating this project both ethically and politically. We argue that the ethical landscape looks different depending on whether one is considering the decision to develop the technology or the decision to use it once it has been developed. If activists and governments wish to avoid the privatisation of responses to IPV, ubiquitous surveillance of domestic spaces, increasing the risk posed to members of minority communities by police responses to IPV, and the danger that more powerful smart speakers will be co-opted by men to control and abuse women, then they should resist the development of this technology rather than wait until these systems are developed. If it is judged that the moral urgency of IPV justifies exploring what might be possible by developing this technology, even in the face of these risks, then it will be imperative that victim-survivors from a range of demographics, as well as government and non-government stakeholders, are engaged in shaping this technology and the legislation and policies needed to regulate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]