Here's the thing, apps don't need to listen. We freely give them more than enough data without any strings. Every post you make, every thumb's up or thumbs down, every link you follow, the time you spend on a page, or the lack of time you spend. What ads you linger over, what you spend money on, and what you used to spend money on but don't anymore. All of this data and more are free for Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and our ISP. Maybe not every piece to every company, but the overlap is considerable. They sell datasets that they have mined out to even their competitors because it's a great source of revenue.

So, listening and parsing spoken language? Nope not yet, and maybe not ever we already give them better information than they could ever get by trolling through thousands of petabytes of audio data looking for hints.

We live in the functional equivalent of a small town full of snoops that are always watching, welcome to the twenty-first century internet.