Yes, but that's not what the person I was responding to said. They said the NSA would record every sound in the house, which would require a detectable amount o

Yes, but that's not what the person I was responding to said. They said the NSA would record every sound in the house, which would require a detectable amount of bandwidth even at low bitrates. The hotword detection (OK Google/Hey Siri/Alexa) currently happens on the device - it would be terribly inefficient to do that in the cloud. If a security researcher notices their Google Home is transmitting significant amounts of data without them using the "OK Google" prompt, that would raise eyebrows.