Voice Assistants

How Voice Assistants Hear a Wake Word Without Processing Everything You Say

A voice assistant can appear to be waiting for you all day. You say its trigger phrase, and it responds almost immediately. That raises a reasonable question: if the device can hear the wake word, does it have to fully recognize and process every conversation in the room first? Usually, no. Devices that support hands-free activation can use a small, specialised wake-word detector that looks for a particular sound pattern. It does not need to understand every sentence in order to decide whether the trigger phrase was probably spoken.