I wish mere mortals could have access to this. Having an easily searchable logs of what was said on calls would solve trillions in contract and court disputes. Many people already use this with third party apps, especially on Android.
My point was just: with audio, you might want to think about really recording, storing and processing everything. But if a phone can do high quality transcriptions and just send them off to government data centers, it becomes sort of a no brainer.
It might even be a cost savings.
There does not seem to be any one app responsible for the data exfil, so I've been led to believe they're building models (or transcribing text locally) and sending it up whenever android phones home (constantly).
I've tried attempting to block data exfiltration (Netguard etc) but nothing seemed to have worked and I had to switch devices.
If they're able to do on-device transcriptions and the tech is mature enough that they're going to release it as a standalone product with a big launch, I can now believe they have some similar tech running on devices to support their core-metrics (engagement w/ YT content, which drives Ad revenue).
Play close attention to your YT video feeds and you may notice the behavior I've observed too.
this has also been observed on an AOSP device that does not have Gapps installed.
This is also a great talk on the magic of science and how magicians exploit flaws in our brain or sensors (e.g. the eyes) perceive and process the environment. One of his examples is that when your eyes are moving from one focus point to the next you are literally blind and don't see anything (basically to prevent motion blur) - but your brain fills in the missing info, and so you can hide sleight of hand in these moments. One of many examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwuRSqODRdA
There are also other explanations for this advertising thing such as you thinking about it because you saw it somewhere, having actually searched or clicked on things related to it and even if you talk to someone else and THEY search about it from the same IP address it can also end up in advertising feeds. And i'm sure many more.
They also used to provide transcripts of voicemail done locally on the phone (although it was not great accuracy)
Edit: Here is the article where apple talks about how "Hey Siri" works: https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html