I did a factory reset on my TCL roku tv and use a third party streaming box. Blinking red light on the TV went away after the factory reset for me.

Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”

I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.

Edit: screenshot of the “Now Playing” feature