Follow-up comment:
I was not trying to troll. This project is right up my alley and I've been using raspberry pi's recently as octoprint servers for my 3D printer. Turning one of my spares into a voice recognition box is interesting to me, which is why I was disappointed that it seemed to be a black box device sending data to "the cloud" in the worst traditions of IoT devices.
A comment defending me mentioned this github:
https://github.com/google/aiyp...
It's clearly not the entire source code for the raspbian distro they are distributing, but it does suggest that there is an "Embedded Assistant API" that might run locally on the pi without internet connectivity.
I'm still reserving judgement until we hear feedback from the brave souls who build this kit.