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arXiv · 2008.03554

Fighting Voice Spam with a Virtual Assistant Prototype

Sharbani Pandit·Jienan Liu·Roberto Perdisci·Mustaque Ahamad
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Abstract

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 {\em 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.

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Sharbani Pandit, Jienan Liu, Roberto Perdisci, Mustaque Ahamad. 2020-08-08. Fighting Voice Spam with a Virtual Assistant Prototype. https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03554

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