Privacy-Enhanced AI Assistants Based on Dialogues and Case Similarity

Personal assistants (PAs) such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple Siri are now widespread. However, without adequate safeguards and controls their use may lead to privacy risks and violations. In this paper, we propose a model for privacy-enhancing PAs. The model is an interpretable AI architecture that combines 1) a dialogue mechanism for understanding the user and getting online feedback from them, with 2) a decision-making mechanism based on case-based reasoning considering both user and scenario similarity. We evaluate our model using real data about users’ privacy preferences, and compare its accuracy and demand for user involvement with both online machine learning and other, more interpretable, AI approaches. Our results show that our proposed architecture is more accurate and requires less intervention from the users than existing approaches.