I didn’t want the phone listening all the time just so I could occasionally say “Ok Google, play the news”
Just FYI, your phone isn’t truly “listening” to you. There’s a separate, low-power chip in most phones these days that has one singular function, which is to listen for the “wake phrase”. It doesn’t understand anything else besides “Hey Google” or “Hey Siri”, or whatever phrase your device uses. This chip has a very small amount of memory, and can only process about 2 seconds’ worth of audio, and has no storage or ability to transmit data to any other part of the OS. The actual OS can’t hear anything you’re saying 99.99% of the time.
When it detects the wake phrase, it triggers waking the phone and activating your mic, where it actually starts to listen to you for the next few seconds to hear your command. But before that, the device can’t hear you at all.
Same goes for smart speakers like Nest, Echo, Home Pod, etc. Granted, Echo has had some issues where it was improperly detecting the wake phrase due to some very bad false positives a few years ago, but I believe Amazon has patched that now, as verified reports of Echo devices hearing more than they should are a lot more rare as of late.
