No it works perfectly well. It worked brilliantly with Siri and had done for years before. People talking about it in the same room is an inconvenience to overcome.

It's possible that Google copied Baidu, which used "Ni hao baidu" [0] is the only thing I can think of.

[0]: https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning-projects/lec... (see the video transcript)