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0 pointsstrogonoff5y ago0 comments

Isn’t this pretty much how voice-activated virtual assistants work? Microphones have to be listening in order for devices to respond to “Hey Siri” and “OK Google”, and it does impact battery life.

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ufmace5y ago· 2 in thread

I think they have some kind of special optimized chip that can listen for only a specific phrase at very low power and wake the rest of the device when it hears it. It seems super unlikely that they can listen constantly to anything anyone says, pick out things that can be advertised for, and show ads for those things the next time the user browses without eating lots of power and data.

stretchcat5y ago

The wake phrase is different in different languages, yet they sell the same hardware to everybody. Therefore, obviously, the wake phrase is reprogrammable. It isn't baked into the silicon.

strogonoffOP5y ago

I think the combination of ever-growing lithium-ion battery resource, hardware energy efficiency and performance with 7 and 5nm processes, and improving on-device speech recognition makes it possible with little to no perceived battery life degradation.

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