Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0
1 year ago
My phone can listen all day every day. It listens for "hey google" and it can listen and passively tell you songs that are playing. It's not outside the realm of possibility to do their audio fingerprinting on keywords and what not. The advertising potential makes it extremely juicy
Your phone can listen for “hey Google” because it’s only one phrase and the model can run at very low power on specialized hardware. If you want to add 1000 keywords the battery drain would be intense.
Pixel phones run song identification constantly now. They have a local database of the top 1000 (?) most popular songs. It has negligible impact on battery life.
Not saying I agree that 'phones are listening to show us ads', but technically we have the capability for that to happen (sampling audio every X intervals and matching against a local database of keywords)
Add at least two zeros to your number. Pixel phones can detect the top 11k songs while being offline (it used to be more). The fingerprint database for this is around 500 MB in size.
I think it is very easy to sneak a few (thousand) extra fingerprints in this database and do all kinds of tracking with it. All while the green microphone icon is disabled.
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Now Playing only has to sample for a few seconds every few minutes when the phone is powered on for other reasons (like to participate in cellular check-ins). This is because a song is typically several minutes long and you only have to fingerprint for a few seconds. It doesn't matter which few seconds. It's not continuously listening, so it's not the same thing at all.
Song identification and speech-to-text are massively different algorithms.
How does it work? Bought my gf a Pixel 8a recently.
These conspiracy theories have been floating around since long before any of this became practical.