HACKER Q&A
📣 amichail

Why can't you talk to Siri on your Mac without saying "Siri" first?


Can't your Mac determine if you're talking to it via its microphones and webcam?


  👤 yawpitch Accepted Answer ✓
No… basically these things need a trigger phrase, otherwise they’re continuously recording and running voice recognition and then NLP in the cloud for every sound in the environment, which is a lot of power investment (never mind privacy concerns) for minimal useful ROI.

The trigger phrase lets a simple, very low power dedicated chip with a simple model look for an audio clip that looks like the trigger phrase, which then kicks in recording and processing, usually off the local device, for whatever prompt follows.