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What makes you think the raw audio stream needs to be sent anywhere. Modern phones are capable of doing keyword extraction on-device.

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You need to know what keywords to listen for before discarding the audio data. An advertising giant might know but a government doesn't.

This conspiracy theory has been around for a lot longer than phone hardware has been capable of doing that.

The Chrome Browser can transcribe audio into text, with what I consider good accuracy. It's well out of the realm of a conspiracy theory when it's been demonstrable for a couple decades.

Don't forget energy usage. The phone would need to be on high power mode all the time to run those kinds of algorithms. There's a reason "Hey Siri" has dedicated low-power hardware - it means it can work without burning through the battery.

> it can work without burning through the battery.

It can work by burning through the battery. When you have a browser open or any number of apps, some of them are certainly detecting.

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