What is a wake word?

Detection runs locally on a tiny model. The device listens for one pattern and sends nothing anywhere until it hears it.

That design exists for privacy and for battery life. Streaming everything a room says to a server would be both invasive and expensive.

False triggers are the well-known failure. Words that rhyme with the phrase wake devices up, which is mildly funny at home and worse in an office.

None of this is relevant to a phone call, because the call itself is the activation. The line opening means someone wants to talk.

Say a veterinary clinic's owner asks a fair question before trying a phone assistant: will this thing be listening to my front desk all day? She's picturing the smart speaker in her kitchen.

Walk through one call. A client dials the clinic at 2:14. The carrier forwards the call, and an audio connection opens between the client's phone and the answering system. That connection carries what the client says into her phone and what the assistant says back. At 2:17 she hangs up and the connection closes.

Between 2:17 and the next call, there's no audio to hear. No microphone sits in the clinic. Staff at the front desk could be discussing anything, and none of it goes anywhere. The only sound source is a caller's own handset during a call. A smart speaker needs a wake word because its microphone is open in your room.

Voice activity detection is the first. It decides whether a stretch of audio contains speech at all, as opposed to silence or noise. Every phone assistant uses it during a call, mainly to work out when the caller starts talking and when they stop. It isn't listening for any particular word.

Keyword spotting is closer. Older phone menus listen for a few fixed words, and callers learned to say representative or agent to escape them. That's a wake word of sorts, used mid-call. A conversational assistant doesn't need the magic word, since a caller can ask for a person in any phrasing. GreetKeeper transfers to your team when a caller asks or when the AI is unsure.

Push-to-talk is the third, where a button opens the microphone. Dictation on your phone keyboard works this way.

When a vendor says always listening, ask what the microphone is and where it sits. For a phone line the honest answer is the caller's phone, for the length of the call.

GreetKeeper has no wake word and needs none. It answers a call, the conversation begins, and it ends when the call does.

Nothing listens between calls. There is no microphone in your office and no always-on device in the product.

Recording and transcription both sit under settings you control, and the disclosure line can announce them at the start.