Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 19, 2015 3:06 UTC (Fri) by kokada (guest, #92849)
In reply to: Enabled by default or not? by testsilicon
Parent article: Chromium suddenly starts downloading a binary blob

I think it is pretty clear that no audio was transmitted, since by default this feature is disabled. Quoting from the bug report:

"First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we *do not* activate it unless you opt in to hotwording. If you go into "chrome://settings", you will see a checkbox "Enable "Ok Google" to start a voice search". This should be unchecked by default, and if you do not check it, the hotword module will not be started."

Speaking strictly from Android (using Google Now, that has a similar feature), the hotword detection is done locally. After the user does a query (that happens after the user says "Ok Google", signaling that the user wants to ask something), this data is send to Google. I think something similar happens in Chrome.

Enabled by default or not?

Posted Jun 19, 2015 14:18 UTC (Fri) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

Just tested it here in Chrome (installed from Google directly on opensuse). One must enable the setting, and on a new tab "OK Google" starts a search. But Chrome asks if google.ca can have access to the microphone, like it would for any other site wanting access.

So the feature really only enables the microphone on the canned google search page, shown on (not quite) blank new tabs.