And the LED should be forbidden by law from being software-controlled.
They should also have a physical inline toggle switch to disconnect the microphone(s) entirely, whose state is easy to visually confirm.
We're also discussing theoretical hardware changes, there's no reason it can't have 2 sets of microphones where one is hardwired only to the wake-word processor which has no direct connection to the main processor except some one-way signalling, and the LED is hardwired to the second set.
The idea that there would somehow be a dedicated wake word microphone is a little ridiculous. Firstly, no one would trust this supposed 1-way connection. Second, it would require a dedicated processor to make the wake word even work, driving up costs. Third, the echo uses an array of microphones so your wake word would either be unreliable or drive costs up further as you duplicate the entire array. Hardly a net win.
The reality is that if you don’t trust amazon to do the right thing you shouldn’t install their listening device in your home. (Likewise for your phone.)
WiFi is always on. WiFi doesn’t disconnect just because you aren’t actively moving data. You’d be pretty annoyed if every time you wanted to send or receive data your device had to reconnect.
If the microphone uses an amplifier, you could wire an LED to light when power is supplied to the amp. The indicator light is physically part of the circuit, so its operation cannot be modified by software. There are probably other, better, ways to do it, I'm not an electronics guy.
I don't think that would be a bad thing; especially if there's a switch to disable the mic. When you turn it off, you'll get reliable feedback to know it's actually off.
I think it's important that these kinds of devices have simple feedback and control mechanisms that can be independently verified and reasoned about. Software is too opaque and too untrustworthy.
I see that, I think it would be best as a separate light.
I think product UX has drifted too far towards blank monoliths; I know I wouldn't mind a few more blinkenlights :)
Doing it via microphone/amp wouldn't do it, since you'd still want to use it without LED on (and not software controlled).
It has that. They call it the power cable.
If you disconnect the microphone, an echo is pretty useless.
We don't live in a world with a healthy enough market or enough competition for that to work.