Fighting Voice Spam with a Virtual Assistant Prototype

08/08/2020

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by   Sharbani Pandit, et al.

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Mass robocalls affect millions of people on a daily basis. Unfortunately, most current defenses against robocalls rely on phone blocklists and are ineffective against caller ID spoofing. To enable the detection of spoofed robocalls, we propose a virtual assistant application that could be integrated on smartphones to automatically vet incoming calls. Similar to a human assistant, the virtual assistant can pick up an incoming call and screen it without user interruption to determine if the call is unwanted. Via a user study, we show that our virtual assistant is able to preserve the user experience of a typical phone call. At the same time, we show that our system can detect mass robocalls without negatively impacting legitimate callers.