Fair point, though I will say unless I look at the circuit myself and confirm the hardware mute switch is cutting an actual signal to/from the microphone, I won't fully trust it. Whether that matters is up for debate - I carry around a Google Pixel phone all day, and while I don't use any of the voice assistants, I also don't audit everything closely enough to guarantee nothing is spying on me randomly.
As for my joke in general - I guess my point, if I have to make one beyond making a joke, is that I don't really trust any company to do what they claim in all circumstances. Even if they have every intention of doing so, some bug or bad actor could compromise the intent - not saying it's identical, but look at the recent issue with Tesla camera pictures being shared. So if you're working on some mission critical or top secret code, I wouldn't trust _anything_ to be running or looking at it - not Copilot, CodeWhisperer, etc. etc.
Once the hardware mute is engaged, I've not had the Alexa reply.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of reasons to bash Amazon. I just don't count Alexa and privacy with mute among them.