Since the talking doll “Cayla” was officially banned by the German Federal Network Agency on February 17th, 2017, the news reports on the subject and privacy overall have not subsided.
Understandable – who wants a spy in the children’s room (or any other room at home), who permanently sends data to a server and potentially to unauthorized third parties? Jochen Homann, the President of the Federal Network Agency, says that “objects that hide cameras or microphones and can transmit data through them without warning endanger the privacy of the people – especially so when they’re integrated into children’s toys.”
With SemVox ODP S3, “conversational agents” such as Cayla can be implemented completely without a connection to the Internet –they are completely embedded and therefore safe.
This means that no data is being sent anywhere at any time, and the home is protected from eavesdroppers. Unnoticed and unwanted monitoring is impossible: the conversations of the child or other persons can not be recorded and forwarded. So-called “unauthorized radio-capable systems in children’s toys” have to be looked at in a nuanced way in the privacy area, however. “Radio-capable“ does not necessarily mean “always sending“. Only if desired, a time-limited, targeted information query can also take place on the Internet (eg, current weather data or child-reworked messages) with ODP S3. After all, security does not end with a block list of words and filter functions for Internet content.
ODP S3 also avoids a further security gap that for example the controversial “Hello Barbie” suffers from: That Barbie always connects with the same password to its companion app – if this password should get in the wrong hands, hackers could easily upload malicious software and mark it as trustworthy. Since SemVox ODP S3 can run completely embedded, this risk is also completely eliminated.
Thanks to the small footprint of ODP S3 and the embedded ASR (Automatic Voice Recognition) and TTS (Text-to-Speech) components, even complex dialogs can run on the toy itself without compromising the quality of the dialogue. ODP S3 uses the extensive possibilities of artificial intelligence for context interpretation as well as for modeling context factors. The comprehensive semantic processing supports the modeling of these context factors and thus ensures a natural, intuitive system behavior. Unlike speech recognition alone, ODP S3 therefore provides intelligent language comprehension and is able to proactively support the user.
Talk to us and make your toy, your device and your robot not only intelligent, but also safe – with virtual personal assistants from SemVox! Find us at CeBIT 2017 in Hanover, hall 11, stand C20 (14).
