How does Siri hear me say “Hey Siri” if it’s not constantly listening to my conversation or me speaking?
In: Technology
If it was constantly listening and analyzing what you were saying, your battery would be dead quickly, and your data would get eaten. So there’s basically there’s a low power listening device in the phone that is hardcoded to only listen for a single phrase. This is also why most of these devices only let you use specific, un-changable phrases, to activate it.
The low power device only has a buffer of a few seconds. Once it hears the trigger word, it wakes up the rest of the software and hands the recording over to it, after which it’s analyzed and responded to.
To top that off, the low-powered listener probably doesn’t even know exactly what words you’re saying. It would just be programmed to hear the general tones that make up “hey siri,” kind of like “high pitch going down followed by two pitches going up within two seconds of each other with no gap in the second sounds.” That’s why you get lots of false positives, or how you can say something *close* to “hey siri” and it will still wake up.
So to answer the question, it *is* constantly listening to you, but it has no idea what you’re saying until it hears the magic sound to wake up it’s better half.
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