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As a very technical person, I'm skeptical, too. There are lots of technical reasons why your phone can't always be listening to you in order to send you ads.
2/ This would drain your battery, really fast. The reason "Hey Siri" or "Okay Google" doesn't drain your phone is because there there is a dedicate hardware chip that does nothing else but listen for that key phrase.
3/ In other words, even if you have these services turned on, your phone is STILL not eavesdropping on you in order to send you advertisements.
4/ These chips aren't precise, which is why they sometimes trigger accidentally, which creeps you out when your phone starts talking back to you in response to something heard on the TV or while having sex, but this is a flaw in the design, it's not designed to be creepy.
5/ The technology for battery operated devices to listen to everything you say just doesn't exist. I mean, as a hacker, I may hack your device and record everything you say, but that'll quickly drain your battery -- about as fast as when you make phone calls.
6/ Of course, today's phone have insanely long "talk time", so if you charge your phone every night, you might not notice that somebody is eavesdropping on you. The point is that any surreptitious eavesdropping equals "talk time" for battery life. 
7/ Now, somebody has a patent for ads on TV to trigger that trigger-word chip using inaudible tones, so that your phone will secretly record the fact you heard the ad on TV, to discover things about you. But that's just theory that nobody is doing in practice.
8/ An example of such a proposal is this one. I'm not sure how it fits in with @OrinKerr's legal analysis, because presumably you'll consent to such things happen when you buy the phone or install a Facebook app.
infiniteprivacy.com/2018/06/facebo…
infiniteprivacy.com/2018/06/facebo…
9/ What your phone does may seem invisible to you, but it's not so invisible to use very technical people. If your phone is secretly eavesdropping on you to deliver ads, that's something we'll usually discover after awhile. It's not something they can get away with for long.
10/ So people are misinterpreting papers like this, using the scariest interpretations. What this paper really does is confirm that such monitoring would drain the battery, and needs an app running.
11/ But mostly, it's talking about different things. It's about "beacons" finding your phone in a place and time, such as seeing if you are in a store, not about eavesdropping on spoken word.
12/ Whether ultrasonic sounds or Bluetooth, such "beacons" have their own privacy concerns, but it's not the concern mentioned above.
