And in a pinch, dongs.

Where are these mythical security engineers that volunteer their time and expertise to delid ASICs and reverse engineer their functionality?

Throw it in a river

Those wake words are indeed running on very low power consumption electronics. And it’s not like they’re made to run exclusively in the USA and listen only for the american english version of “OK Google”. No, that ASIC is made to listen to a select set of phonemes from the most common languages. It then feeds a tokenized representation of what was spoken to whatever needs it downstream. The wake word is programmable - a series of phoneme tokens. But what about the rest? Cache them somewhere and next time the phone is woken up transmit them to google for ad processing.

Good luck decrypting it. And they do the spoken language decoding on the device itself so it just sends super highly compressed tokens in really, really small payloads at whatever asynchronous rates it wants to. So wireshark is totally worthless here.

Uninstall the following apps:

• Anything google
• Anything facebook
• Anything amazon

That’s not an exhaustive list. But the reality is those companies make money by spying on you in order to serve you ads. They have been caught red handed multiple times breaking out of the OS sandbox to get permissions the apps were otherwise not granted - to spy on you. Don’t trust them. If you need one of those services, use your phone’s browser.