All recent Nexus phones have always-on hotword support. I just tested it from 20 feet ("OK Google, what's the weather like tomorrow") and it worked fine.
In this message I'm trying to make the argument I think they would make (I personally use monospaced fonts).
It's not that Acme can't use monospaced fonts, it's that Rob/Russ/others don't want to use them. Proportional fonts are better fonts, so why not use them instead? One possible reason is that existing code formatting conventions assume that text is lined up in columns, but we have a tab key that magically lines things up: it's the whole job of the tab key. So, why not forget about space-based alignment, use the tab key for the job it was built to do, and get the advantage of using pretty fonts?
A significant fraction of the Go core engineers use proportional fonts when programming. On their screens, hard tabs are the only tabs that work. Spaces on proportional fonts are too tiny to be useful for moving code around.
It takes some practice to learn how to dictate a response the way that you would type it. However, it has a lot of advantages. For instance I was able to dictate this response to my smartphone in a lot less time than would have taken to type it.
Feel free to say "Hello" to get a quick tutorial of the assistant features. The Google app understands searches as well as assistant-like features (like "send a text" or "open Facebook")