Google is testing smart speakers feature that would remove wake word requirement

This sounds scary. AFAIK wake word activates the advanced speech recognition. Wake word speech recognizer is a more "primitive" speech recognition model, which can't understand anything other than the words it was trained for (like "Hey Google" or "Alexa").

So, now, removing it means the advanced speech recognition runs all the time? Which is always 'on' and can understand everything spoken? Sounds like potential privacy invasion.