But doesn't it have to record the voice to be able to identify it? Once the sound waves are converted to a format that the machine can process, it has been recorded.
I think the biggest issue here is how smart speakers work: They record your audio and then send it to be permanently stored on Google, Amazon, or Apple's servers, rather than being processed locally and discarded, which we have the technology to do just fine today.
The only reason we're retaining voice recordings is to provide valuable data to the companies in question.
Indeed you can discard unstored data.
I write data pipelines for a living. We often use "discard" as a term for parts of data on which no further processing is performed and are not stored.
It's an extremely common usage of the term. See [1] for example.
[1] https://bash.cyberciti.biz/guide//dev/null_discards_unwanted...