Virtual assistants are poised to revolutionize the digital interface by providing us with a simple, unified, natural-language interface to all our personal accounts and IoT devices. However, they can become the biggest threat to data privacy and the open internet if a monopoly or duopoly emerges. This talk describes how virtual assistants can also be an opportunity to give privacy back to consumers. We need an open-source, federated architecture that lets users run a virtual assistant on their devices, or choose from many possible vendors. These virtual assistants can let us control what, and precisely with whom and how, we wish to share easily in natural language. We demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach with an open-source virtual assistant prototype called Almond.
