I'm going to guess that it is a little fancier than that, because simply being "always on" would kill the battery, the CPU would have to be constantly running hotword detection. It needs to have some kind of extremely low-power hotword detection for this to work. Like with Glass, some of the conspiracy nuts in other forums are out with ideas that its recording everything and piping it to the NSA, but that's unlikely for a device where they've hinted battery life was a major thing they're concentrating on.
The article mentions Rogers as 'one of the most popular Canadian cellular companies' but the term 'popular' implies Rogers is liked, however in my limited experience they are either universally reviled or many feel indifference towards them.<p>They are effectively Canada's Comcast (largest cable company) so take that as you will.
Are we really moving to a space where always listening devices are going to be common? If so they might be taking their first step at the wrongest possible time (Ongoing NSA paranoia).<p>Everyone is throwing the Xbox One under a bus for having a always listening device, I wonder how receptive those same people would be to this, especially if it gets added to the core functionality of Android.