What you say is true. But it is not the full story. Yes that is the way it is supposed to work. But there isn’t much stopping it from being “smarter” than that. Instead of just waking up on specific phoneme patterns, it could wake up on any phoneme pattern. It might miss the first word or two, but that’s not terribly important. Such a mode would not be a major battery drain, since most of the time no one will be speaking.
Combine that with a terms of service that has no set terms and the ad biz’s insatiable hunger for moar data and I do not think it is unreasonable to assume that such toys (and other digital assistants) will end up eavesdropping 24x7.
