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The thing I always come back to with these claims is battery life and/or data usage. If your phone was always listening to you, it would need to either be alway

by orev 8y ago

The thing I always come back to with these claims is battery life and/or data usage. If your phone was always listening to you, it would need to either be always streaming the audio data back to home base, in which case you’d notice the data usage, or it would be doing on-device voice recognition, which would cause noticeable battery drain. Both cases would make it very easy to detect and this question would already be answered definitively.

pmoriarty 8y ago
"If your phone was always listening to you, it would need to either be always streaming the audio data back to home base" Not necessarily. It could also send the data intermittently, in batches. Even then, of course, there would be data usage. But you might not notice it. It might be hidden as part of the data use of various Google apps. For instance, on my phone the "Google Play Store", "Android OS", "Google Services" and "Google" apps regularly send or receive many megabytes of data. What data they're sending is completely opaque to me. If it was recorded voice data, I'd never know.
rjf72 8y ago
You could test your local drain hypothesis pretty easily. Turn on voice activation of e.g. Google on an Android. This means your device is now listening to and analyzing every word to see if it ever recognizes 'Okay Google'. If your theory is correct you'd notice a substantial battery drain compared to having this functionality disabled. I'm going to guess you will notice basically nothing. The nice thing about neural network driven systems is that while they are very resource intensive to build, once built they are (generally) extremely resource friendly. And training a network to recognize one of a wide array of terms would be no more difficult than training one to recognize Okay Google. And the best thing is that false hits don't really matter that much, if you assume the only motivation is advertising. Though, for what it's worth, my bet would be on exfiltration of the data instead of local analysis. Put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine your goal is to exfiltrate data from a device in a covert fashion. You can come up with countless clever ways starting at the most low level with extreme compression. All that matters is that what is said can be recovered - it doesn't need to sound pleasant, or even intelligible as long as another system can reconstruct the speech (even if at great computational expense) from what you send. And from there you can come up with all sorts of clever ideas such as only sending the data during other normal transmissions.

by orev 8y ago

pmoriarty 8y ago

"If your phone was always listening to you, it would need to either be always streaming the audio data back to home base" Not necessarily. It could also send the data intermittently, in batches. Even then, of course, there would be data usage. But you might not notice it. It might be hidden as part of the data use of various Google apps. For instance, on my phone the "Google Play Store", "Android OS", "Google Services" and "Google" apps regularly send or receive many megabytes of data. What data they're sending is completely opaque to me. If it was recorded voice data, I'd never know.

rjf72 8y ago

You could test your local drain hypothesis pretty easily. Turn on voice activation of e.g. Google on an Android. This means your device is now listening to and analyzing every word to see if it ever recognizes 'Okay Google'. If your theory is correct you'd notice a substantial battery drain compared to having this functionality disabled. I'm going to guess you will notice basically nothing. The nice thing about neural network driven systems is that while they are very resource intensive to build, once built they are (generally) extremely resource friendly. And training a network to recognize one of a wide array of terms would be no more difficult than training one to recognize Okay Google. And the best thing is that false hits don't really matter that much, if you assume the only motivation is advertising. Though, for what it's worth, my bet would be on exfiltration of the data instead of local analysis. Put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine your goal is to exfiltrate data from a device in a covert fashion. You can come up with countless clever ways starting at the most low level with extreme compression. All that matters is that what is said can be recovered - it doesn't need to sound pleasant, or even intelligible as long as another system can reconstruct the speech (even if at great computational expense) from what you send. And from there you can come up with all sorts of clever ideas such as only sending the data during other normal transmissions.