  The increasing reach and functionality of voice assistants has allowed them
to become a general-purpose platform for tasks like playing music, accessing
information, and controlling smart home devices. In order to maintain the
quality of third-party skills and to protect children and other members of the
public from inappropriate or malicious skills, platform providers have
developed content policies and certification procedures that skills must
undergo prior to public release. Unfortunately, research suggests that these
measures have been ineffective at curating voice assistant platforms, with
documented instances of skills with significant security and privacy problems.
This provocation paper outlines how the underlying architectures of these
platforms had turned skill certification into a seemingly intractable problem,
as well as how current certification methods fall short of their full
potential. We present a roadmap for improving the state of skill certification
on contemporary voice assistant platforms, including research directions and
actions that need to be taken by platform vendors. Promoting this change in
domestic voice assistants is especially important, as developers of commercial
and industrial assistants or other similar contexts increasingly look to these
devices for norms and conventions.
