alt Hacker News> In order to detect a wake word then they must be collecting or recording ambient conversations.
There's a risk here that we will talk-past one another while using different meanings of the same words, so let me offer a scenario:
AcmeTV has an isolated component which taps microphone input, records to a 5-second ring buffer, and on "Wakey-Wakey" triggers an alert flag. Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Would you accuse AcmeTV of "recording or collecting ambient conversations" on the basis of that component constantly reading microphone data?
Personally I wouldn't, because it's not the same kind of "recording" we consumers are concerned about.
Replies
Later, AcmeTV has a 1MB lookup table of wake words that can be updated OTA. Whenever a wake word is detected, it triggers an alert flag with the device id, word id, and timestamp, and then broadcasts it out as high-frequency sound through the speakers.
Nearby, another AcmeTV or business partner device picks up the sound and sends it to AcmeHQ.
The former device "never transmits your viewing behavior to Acme". The latter device "never records your viewing behavior".
> Assume it works perfectly accurately.
Well this is a silly assumption. Wake word false positives happen all the time. (“No Siri, I wasn’t talking to you…”)