Which is horribly naive, because there's nothing that prevented your RAZR from listening to you, other than the good intentions of Motorola. First, you need to

Which is horribly naive, because there's nothing that prevented your RAZR from listening to you, other than the good intentions of Motorola. First, you need to answer this question: can you trust the device maker? If the answer is "yes," then both types of devices are fine. If your phone says it doesn't listen to you when it's not supposed to, it doesn't. If your home assistant says it doesn't listen to you except some dumb routine to check for the wake word, it doesn't. If the answer is "no," then both types of devices are bad. If you can't trust a home assistant not to spy on you contrary to what the manufacturer says, then you can't trust a phone either. It's possible to trust one and not the other if you distrust a particular manufacturer. But I haven't seen anyone saying "I don't trust Amazon specifically, but I'd be fine with a home assistant if it was made by Company X." It's always a blanket "why does anyone ever allow anything like this into their homes?" To be clear, it's the "newfound" I object to. There's definitely a privacy conundrum here, but it's an old one, and 99% of people have already decided they do not care.