Your source indicates it's part of Google's OK Google feature, which AFAIK is opt-out on Android as well. The headline makes it seem a little more overblown than it is.

Google's "opt-out" features are so difficult to uniformly turn off. The article points out that Google still tracks location data when you turn location tracking off because there is some other option in a different screen that you also need to turn off.

Further, most people never even know to opt-out of these tracking options in the first place, because they don't know that Google is collecting voice data.

> Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.

In my world that means chrome would be able to do that; not that is actually listen/recording/uploading stuff all the time. Thats what the image popup says, at least.