[izacus]

> How is echo audio data substantially different than something like a tape recorder that was live in the man's home? What about a cell phone that was on a call at the time of the alleged murder?

It's not about the technology - a tape recorder isn't on the whole time while it's in your house and won't get accidentally turned on by you speaking. Alexa is listening the whole time and gets triggered even for non-standard phrases essentially sending snippets of conversations to Amazon you didn't explicitly plan to.

It's very very very rare that people press REC on a tape recorder and forget about it. It's very common for Alexa to trigger on phrases that aren't meant for it.

[sib]

Just to clarify: The Echo - the hardware - is processing audio constantly to spot the wake word. Alexa - the cloud software - is definitely not "listening the whole time." Yes, the wake word spotting may occasionally trip a false positive, in which case the lights go on (and you can set it to also make a sound any time it wakes, if you prefer.)