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Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants (arxiv.org)
3 points by headalgorithm on Aug 29, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A filter between your device and the cloud service rewrites your voice to hide clues about your mood and identity while keeping the speech usable. In emotion-recognition tests, the rewritten audio reduced correct identification of the speaker's emotional state by about 96%.

Abstract

Voice-enabled interactions provide more human-like experiences in many popular IoT systems. Cloud-based speech analysis services extract useful information from voice input using speech recognition techniques. The voice signal is a rich resource that discloses several possible states of a speaker, such as emotional state, confidence and stress levels, physical condition, age, gender, and personal traits. Service providers can build a very accurate profile of a user's demographic category, personal preferences, and may compromise privacy. To address this problem, a privacy-preserving intermediate layer between users and cloud services is proposed to sanitize the voice input. It aims to maintain utility while preserving user privacy. It achieves this by collecting real time speech data and analyzes the signal to ensure privacy protection prior to sharing of this data with services providers. Precisely, the sensitive representations are extracted from the raw signal by using transformation functions and then wrapped it via voice conversion technology. Experimental evaluation based on emotion recognition to assess the efficacy of the proposed method shows that identification of sensitive emotional state of the speaker is reduced by ~96 %.

Ranya Aloufi, Hamed Haddadi, David Boyle
arXiv:1908.03632 · cs.CR, cs.LG, cs.SD, eess.AS, stat.ML · submitted Aug 9, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 5 pages, 4 figures, privacy Preserving Machine Learning Workshop, CCS 2019

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