VITAS : Guided Model-based VUI Testing of VPA Apps

Virtual personal assistant (VPA) services, e.g. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are becoming increasingly popular recently. Users interact with them through voice-based apps, e.g. Amazon Alexa skills and Google Assistant actions. Unlike the desktop and mobile apps which have visible and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate interaction, VPA apps convey information purely verbally through the voice user interface (VUI), which is known to be limited in its invisibility, single mode and high demand of user attention. This may lead to various problems on the usability and correctness of VPA apps.

In this work, we propose a model-based framework named Vitas to handle VUI testing of VPA apps. Vitas interacts with the app VUI, and during the testing process, it retrieves semantic information from voice feedbacks by natural language processing. It incrementally constructs the finite state machine (FSM) model of the app with a weighted exploration strategy guided by key factors such as the coverage of app functionality. We conduct a large-scale testing on 41,581 VPA apps (i.e., skills) of Amazon Alexa, the most popular VPA service, and find that 51.29% of them have weaknesses. They largely suffer from problems such as unexpected exit/start, privacy violation and so on. Our work reveals the immaturity of the VUI designs and implementations in VPA apps, and sheds light on the improvement of several crucial aspects of VPA apps.