For something hosted on a phone, I think they could improve the feel of privacy just by discarding the wake-word concept. This also allows them to cut out the passive listening hardware (saving money) or software load (saving battery life and CPU overhead)
If you have the phone in your hands anyway, it's not that outlandish to have a button you press to engage Siri/Cortana/etc. This also avoids annoying/embarrassing accidental triggers.
The only thing I ever used Cortana for (back in the Windows Phone 8 days) was the geofenced stuff-- "take the perishable items out of the car when you get home".
Absurd thought: With enough data mining, not having the assistant's features discoverable could become itself a feature: Sifting through a billion requests and where it falls back to web requests could expose "desire paths"-- the specific functionality consumers expect a voice-assistant to provide but wouldn't necessarily know to ask for on a marketing survey.
If you have the phone in your hands anyway, it's not that outlandish to have a button you press to engage Siri/Cortana/etc. This also avoids annoying/embarrassing accidental triggers.
The only thing I ever used Cortana for (back in the Windows Phone 8 days) was the geofenced stuff-- "take the perishable items out of the car when you get home".
Absurd thought: With enough data mining, not having the assistant's features discoverable could become itself a feature: Sifting through a billion requests and where it falls back to web requests could expose "desire paths"-- the specific functionality consumers expect a voice-assistant to provide but wouldn't necessarily know to ask for on a marketing survey.