I feel creeped out by these home listening devices and I don't own one, but don't our phones already have this capability? You can turn "Ok Google" on on an android phone. I sometimes record audio, and the mic is incredibly good. Is there a substantial difference between our phones and these devices?
EDIT: Just realized the substantial difference is that Google and Amazon own all of these things. They don't control all makes and models of phones.
I got an Echo Dot a month ago, because there was a special offer on Amazon for the Philips Hue system, and it included one free. After reading this and having a discussion with my girlfriend last night about how she needs a backup of something, but we don't have a DVD writer at home (she's not tech savvy and thinks people still back-up stuff on DVDs), and now, the second day my Amazon daily offers is filled with portable DVD writers, it starts to creep me out and the first thing that I want to do when I go home is to unplug it. I know it can be a crazy coincidence and I was never the kind of guy that believed this Facebook is listening to you, but still, what if they actually just listen for some keywords?
It might just be a coincidence and a psychological bias that you noticed it, but given that it would have a very, very clear economic benefit to Amazon if it were true, we're stuck with these facts:
1.) They have an economic incentive to do so
2.) Only they know how their systems work
3.) Their network traffic is encrypted
4.) They face legal risks and user backlash if caught doing so
Given 2+3, you can't be entirely sure that they aren't doing it. If they deny it, your only recourse is to hope that their cost/benefit calculus considers 4.) to be more costly in terms of dollars.
"Okay Google" and "Hey Siri" run locally on the device, but all other transcription is done "in the cloud". Try setting your phone on airplane mode and going "Hey Siri, What time is it?"
It will recognize the Hey Siri, but give an error for everything else. Pretty sure "Okay Google" will behave the same way. Also if you turn on battery save on iOS it disables "Hey Siri".
This. It would be a tremendous battery drain if your phone had the microphone on at all times, with a constant connection to the server, sending all audio over it at all times, just so it can detect when somebody says "hey siri".
It's a custom low-power chip they added on the 6S and later to allow a local tight loop that only listens for that utterance using a hardware-assisted neural net, and only activates the rest of the software stack if it detected it with reasonable confidence.
Not sure about Android phones with "Ok Google" but on iOS, all of Siri's voice processing is on the device. As opposed to Amazon Alexa which sends the data to the cloud for processing.
EDIT: Just realized the substantial difference is that Google and Amazon own all of these things. They don't control all makes and models of phones.