Can anyone tell this meme is true or false? I don't have Gspy so I cannot test this
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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It's not true anymore, but Alexa's used to only listen for specific keywords using a low-energy local-only chip.
It has since changed, as stated, and I have to assume other vendors followed suit.
As a specific example, the ESP32 chip does low power voice recognition for pre-trained trigger words. This lightweight recognition lacks the training to detect anything other than the list of trigger words that Espressif provides.
Basically only battery-operated devices work this way (for power consumption reasons). If you’re plugged in you’re probably always running the high quality listening loop.
Even in the first scenario, what stops there from being multiple wake words with different functionality? So like "ok google" wakes up the bot but "pepsi" wakes it silently and has it tick a box on the back end of a server that now sends me Coke adds because they paid about $3.50 for the privilege?
Pretty much nothing. Any company with the resources of Google or Amazon could easily have their top 100 wake words trained into that model.