I've had to disable "Hey Siri" because my daughters name is pronounced vaguely similar to Siri. Worst thing is, Siri transcribes what it hears, and it transcribes my daughters name. So it doesn't hear wrong; it just activates on a different name than Siri.
I've tried telling Siri to shut up; but it never learns not to activate when I call out my daughters name.
At least that's what I heard about how iirc Alexa works.
Siri is easy enough so we never looked much into it, but “OK Google” for instance looked like a real PITA, so we did some research before buying an assistant.
It appears a ton of people just intentionally say “Ok GooGoo”, “Ok Boogle” etc., whatever is easier for them to pronounce and it works perfectly fine.
It’s a genuinely hard problem to solve, and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to Apple for instance when they have humans reviewing samples. There may be other motivations, there’s ton of people in any of these companies, any given feature must be seen from a different angle depending on the department looking at it.
But I think a lot of what we see as privacy violating is primarily an effect of the flaws and all the hacks needed to make the feature work at all (when it works).