Even as your virtual assistant reads out your email to you, your brain gets distracted enough to avoid performing tasks that require your full attention.

Its a great addition, and I have confidence that customers systems are protected.

Sometimes theyre dangerous, and other times downright hilarious.

Operated by artificial intelligence, technologies such as Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana have become ubiquitous in our culture.

But what exactly do they do And how seriously should we take them While all the tech giants want us to use their smart assistants all the time, what do they offer us in return And how do we keep our information and conversations safe.

I shouldnt expect Amazons Echo to give me step-by-step directions to the nearest pizza placeor should I.

Do you want to be able to control appliances or other devices in your home at the sound of your voice Do you want to be able to look up valuable information without having to reach for your phone or boot up your computer Are you looking for some virtual company for yourself or your kids.

In addition, they each have their specialties, so take a good hard look at which technology is the best fit for your needs.

And while you are shopping around, do not ignore the security implicationsboth whats possible today and what could come to pass.

When the smart assistant is unable to understand the voice command, its AI experiences a dilemma between being sure of the received instructions and the danger of annoying the owner by having to ask to repeat the question or instructions too many times.

This brings with it the risk of the assistant misunderstanding the given instructions and taking unwanted actions as a result.

The possible consequences can range from slightly annoying mistakes to ridiculous behavior, such as sending a recorded conversation to all your contacts.

Machine learning is being credited with significantly improving voice recognition, but theres a long way to go before smart assistants can hear and process requests with the accuracy of human beings.

This absolutely extends to smart assistants, who can be accessed by children in the house alone, by simple voice command.

Unlike phones and other screen devices, smart assistants are screen-less and encourage more human-like interactions.

Experts are cautiously optimistic of the effects of smart assistants on children, but we hesitate to fully endorse the technologys safety for kids, especially considering some of the security vulnerabilities inherent in the software, which we will cover below.

So we may be tempted, without thinking it through, to give control over our IoT devices to our smart assistants.

Under normal circumstances, this shouldnt be a problembut circumstances are not always normal.

Devices get lost, stolen, hacked into, and otherwise compromised by less-than-well-meaning individuals, which can be troublesome, to say the least, when they are in control of your domestic devices.

These are ultrasonic audio waves that are hard to hear for humans, but that the smart assistant would interpret as a command.

To protect yourself from these types of attacks, you would have to turn the smart assistant off until you need it or introduce a confirmation protocol for certain commands, which would alert the human to the fact that the assistant has received a command of some sort.

For convenience, the protocol could be set to work only in the case of sensitive operations.

One could compare this to a 2FA for a certain subset of commands.

In fact, the weaponization of IoT is just starting, but we expect it to grow quickly as there is little security in place to stop it.

Smart Assistant