"When developers launched Monsieur Cuisine, they planned for the device to be voice activated and eventually to be connected to Alexa... Risks of hacking exist, but in the same way as for any tablet or device

critics maintain that the lack of security updates for the software [Android 2017] mean it is less protected than other devices

even though the Monsieur Cuisine Connect microphone device itself is dormant, its software could potentially be exploited and used to activate the microphone remotely, thereby giving hackers a recording line into people’s homes"

https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Smart-Monsieur-C...

Many of those connected appliances can receive software updates.

They probably thought "Let's put a mic in, it costs nothing, we'll add speech recognition later when it's ready."