Not necessarily you or your case, but I'm still convinced that a lot of people just have confirmation bias (only noticing it when it happens and discounting the thousands of otherwise innocent ads). There's also subconscious ad effects, like you were only talking about it to begin with because your saw it somewhere because it's been spreading by weird of mouth from people who initially saw an ad

That's the gist of how it likely works; the wake word is detected by an "always on" audio DSP, but a software mode prevents the passing of microphone data back up to the SoC. I'm actually quite familiar with Amazon Echo engineering design, and they implement the "mute" feature in a manner that takes privacy seriously: the LED indicator on that button is hardwired to only turn on when the microphone is literally powered off. Thus, an Echo device can't even manage such a cheeky response, nor can a software bug or hack enable listening while the mute button is lit.

What you describe is actually how it works. If they actually sent all you say to their servers, it would be trivial to detect with a network analyser.

I will say that that's exactly how the google voice api works. Of course it's all in a black box, but that's how the documentation describes it and how it functions when making a voice app

Back in the day when everything had to be processed server-side sure.

Now we have purpose-built hardware helping work this shit out. The devices are basically capable of handling native language resolution locally. They're no longer need to farm the data out. I still don't think they're doing this we would see it in the open source operating systems, but if they wanted to any late model cell phone would be absolutely fine parsing out your interests from your conversations. Hell, I'm sure the contents of this dictation I'm making now are being reduced and added to my social graph at Google.

I think this should be fairly easy to test yourself. Just disconnect from the WAN, say the wake word, and see if the device responds.

Then how would you use it as a phone?

Doesn't matter if the spyware is hardware installed in your SOCs!

Good ol Lenovo.

One Plus 7 Pro had a camera that would physically dissappear when not in use.

Was my favorite phone for a while