> Because it's a literal hardware limitation. Citation needed. Further, listening for a wake word and reacting to that is likely done completely in software:

> Because it's a literal hardware limitation. Citation needed. Further, listening for a wake word and reacting to that is likely done completely in software: the fact it's even listening for a "wake word" means the hardware (microphone) is in fact always listening, it's just [presumably] not actually sending that audio to The Cloud (tm).