On The Platform

Smart speakers are listening to 40 million Americans each day. But they don’t always understand what they hear. That can open the door to cybercrime. Listen as Mark Egner, Senior Manager, Accenture Security, and Malek Ben Salam, Accenture’s Cybersecurity R&D lead, examine some of the unexpected security issues that smart speakers can create. Voice-controlled devices are making our lives much easier – with the range of tasks they can address expanding all the time. But, depending how they’re trained to recognize speech, they can misinterpret commands and generate the wrong outcomes. Different regional accents and patterns of speech, as well as skills that have very similar names, can lead to bad outcomes. Cyber criminals can often predict these and by “skill squatting” insert themselves in a conversation to access users’ credentials. Platforms providing voice-related services must take a number of key steps to keep users secure and maintain that most precious commodity of all: trust. Read more about our ca