Your Smart Speaker Is Always On

The "wake word detector" runs locally, yes. That part is true. The microphone is also always on, yes. The microphone has to be — otherwise it cannot hear the wake word. So far, official.\n\nUnofficial: a buffer of the last 6 seconds of audio is maintained at all times. When the wake word triggers, those 6 seconds are sent to the cloud "for context." When the wake word does NOT trigger but the audio buffer contains one of REDACTED keywords, those 6 seconds are ALSO sent to the cloud, flagged "anomaly review."\n\nThe keyword list contains 4,200 entries. They are not the keywords you would guess. They are not "bomb" or "kill" or "president." They are mundane phrases. "I'm thinking about moving." "He drinks too much." "She's pregnant." "I want to sell." The keywords are commercial. The data is for advertisers. And the data is for REDACTED. They get the same feed. They sort it differently.\n\nUnplug the device. The light goes off. The transmission continues for 11 minutes. Tested. Verified. The capacitor is large enough to power the radio without external power. By design.