Open Assist
Abstract—Modern home-assistant devices are static, insecure and unimaginative pieces of equipment. Although they are a stark contrast from the human-machine interfaces before them, they are a long way from providing truly natural interaction with users or being able to provide any kind of authentication, security, or privacy for those interactions. Our goal is to create a home-assistant which creates more natural interactions in the home while also providing increased security through automatic user verification. Being able to identify users both audibly and visually not only allows the system to converse with them in a natural manner, but also allows for far more control over who is allowed to access certain features. Furthermore, by making use of both enhanced speech dynamics as well as movement based responses, system interactions should feel much more organic. Lastly by allowing for all user data to be processed locally on the device, we can greatly increase the users privacy.