This might sound pedantic but it is very nefarious to me that Apple is marketing a device as "never recording" when it is actually always recording. And this is a claim going back to Siri with wake words. Again, they claim it doesn’t record and I don’t see the logic there.
Ah, it feels like this may be the crux of the issue, because that's pretty much what uncompressed audio is. Every value in a WAV file roughly represents the displacement of the microphone diaphragm at time t.
> A human listens. A digital system cannot listen because it must always write
There are two issues with what you're saying, depending on what you mean by that:
1) Transmission isn't storage. When you talk to me you it would be unreasonable to say that your voice is being "recorded" in the air or in my eardrum or even necessarily in my brain, even though vibrations are in some real sense physically present across the air molecules and my eardrum is being physically displaced and my brain is doing...well...some unknown ephemeral aggregation in order to produce thoughts in my head from what you're saying. So if you transmit bits over a wire, and even if you have enough wires to represent bits from many time quanta, you should likewise not call those bits recorded by the same principle of innate ephemerality.
Bits on wire in audio stream at time t ~= position of your eardrum at time t. Neither are reasonably considered storage without persistence, which we have no knowledge of, and neither are reasonably considered on their own to be representations of what is being said.
2) You don't need to accumulate data to analyze it. You can, but you don't need to, and I don't think we know that they are.
You can think of a hash function. A hash function need not record its input stream. It need only record the accumulated influence of the input on the prediction. Storing a running statistical guess about whether you're talking and recording what you're saying are not the same thing.