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You can disable the voice assistant on a cell phone and many phones come with it disabled by default. It is up to you to have it on.

How do you trust that it’s actually disabled?

Run a custom ROM and monitor network connections. Don't trust, verify.

Good luck verifying that radio chip.

Well, if you can verify the data being fed into the chip by the software that you can verify...

The 3G/4G modem is a different chip with its own ARM CPU. Android and iOS communicate with it over a limited AT-API.

I suppose you could use a dedicated 4G modem and connect a WiFi-only tablet to that.

You can't completely. Android is free software, but the driver blobs are not, and are often known to have security flaws.

It's not something that I am OK with. It's a compromise.

I am excited for the librem phone[0], but I can't afford something like that at the moment.

How do you know it is disabled? Plus far easier to have additional rogue software on a phone versus one of these smart speakers.