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The "Hey Google" detection in the Google app has a hard Play Services dependency. Unfortunately, I don't think a replacement for the wake word is possible without some kind of system-level implementation. microG might be able to implement this, but I don't think the project has enough resources to make it a priority.

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Thanks, this was my thinking. I took a look at microG and couldn't see any reference to it on the status page: https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status

The options to make a true opensource assistant that would work in the same capacity as Alexa/Siri/Google (invoked via wakeword) is therefore quite limited. An alternative is to have it listening constantly, maybe as a background service, but this would use up too much battery I suspect.

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