Whisper is cool. Back in college I wanted to do some projects with speech-to-text and text-to-speech as an interface like 10-12 years ago, but at that point the only option was google APIs that charged by the word or second.<p>On top of that, constantly sending data to google would have chewed a ton of battery compared to the "activation word" style solutions ("ok google/siri") that can be done on-device. The power for on-device processing was obviously going to come down over time, while wireless is much more governed by the laws of physics, and connectivity power budgets haven't gone down nearly as much over time. I am pretty sure there is a fundamental asymptotic limit for this, governed by Shannon entropy limit/channel width and power output. In the presence of a noise floor of X, for a bandwidth of Y, you simply cannot use less than Z total power for moving a given amount of data.<p>BTLE is really the first game-changer (especially if you are hooking into a broad network of receivers like apple does with airtags) but even then you are not really breaking this rule - you are just transmitting less often, and sending less data. It's just a different spot on the curve that happens to be useful for IOT. If you are, say, doing a keyboard over BTLE where the duty cycle is higher, the power will be too. Applications that need "100% duty cycle"/"interactive" (reachable at any time with minimal latency") still have not improved very much.<p>In hindsight I guess the answer would have been writing a mobile app that ties into google/siri keywords and actions, and letting the phone be the UI and only transmit BT/BTLE to the device. But BTLE hadn't hit the scene back then (or at least not nearly to the extent it has now) and I was less experienced/less aware of that solution sapce.