It's nonsense, only mentioned in some random deck with no technical details, the article says as much. So probably just a hopeful middle manager that let their fantasies get the better of them. Got an actual source?
CMG Responds to Reports About Discontinued Active Listening Product
As we stated before, CMG businesses have never listened to any conversations nor had access to anything beyond third-party aggregated, anonymized, and fully encrypted data sets that can be used for ad placement. The information referenced in recent stories is based on outdated materials for a product that CMG Local Solutions no longer sells (although the product never listened to customers, it has long been discontinued to avoid misperception). CMG Local Solutions markets a wide range of advertising tools. Like other advertising companies, some of those tools include third-party vendor products powered by data sets sourced from users by digital publishers and other applications and then packaged and resold to data servicers. Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users. This data can then be sold to third-party companies and converted into anonymized information for advertisers. This anonymized data then is resold by numerous advertising companies.
In particular, let me highlight this sentence:
Advertising data based on voice and other data is collected by these platforms and devices under the terms and conditions provided by those apps and accepted by their users.
To me, this sounds like "We did not spy ourselves, but we bought data from other people who did the spying for us, and that was legal because some user checked a checkbox somewhere".
