My first thought was 2-party state violations, 24/7? However, any legally-minded people want to explain how they threaded the needle on this?

I have real respect for Apple's "Private Cloud Compute" architecture [0], I am not a hater, just trying to understand.

Are these the dividends Apple is getting from doing this truly impressive work?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49427928 - https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

It really depends on what you consider a recording. If audio is streamed though a transcription engine and never saved in a way that could be replayed, it's hard to argue that a recording has been made. The live audio was transcribed.