Xbox One: Constantly Listening.

During a PR move designed to make the Xbox One appear more attractive, Microsoft’s hardware program manager, John Link, let slip that a component bundled with the console, the Kinect, will contain a microphone that never turns off.
The current version of the Kinect also contains a microphone but that can be switched off.
Speaking last night, Link said:
“The Kinect has a variety of settings. You know, it’s always available to the system, so … you can count, as an application developer
or a game developer, [that] everyone’s going to have a Kinect. You always have that stream available. And then, you know, there are settings,
obviously, in the console to be able to change the settings of how your Kinect is used, if you’re interested.
“It will be just listening enough to know that, ‘Hey, I heard something interesting. Somebody’s probably trying to wake me up.’ It sends it to the
console for confirmation, and then it can really power up to that high-power state.”

http://intellihub.com/2013/05/24/xbox-one-constantly-listening-to-conversations/