With these digital voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, always listening to us, many of us are worried about privacy. These products like an Amazon Echo, are only supposed to be listening for that trigger phrase “Alexa”. But could it be listening to more than just that? It could. But Alexa also keeps recordings of different things that you have said to Alexa. The good thing is, though, you can delete those recordings.
These recordings are helpful for Alexa, as you can go into the app and tell Amazon whether Alexa did what you expected or not. This helps Amazon and its engineers improve Alexa over time, and Alexa could always use some improvement. But if you are worried about Amazon keeping these recordings of your voice, you can delete them.
Amazon allows you to delete individual recordings, as well as delete all recordings of commands you’ve given to Alexa. Both are rather simple to do, and we’re going to walk you through both methods.
How to delete individual Alexa Voice Recordings
If you haven’t already, download and sign in to the Amazon Alexa app. You can download it from the Google Play Store.
Within the Amazon Alexa app, tap on the “More” tab in the bottom right-hand corner and select Settings.
Once you’re in settings, tap on Alexa Privacy. It’ll be towards the bottom, before you get to the Alexa Preferences section.
Tap on Review Voice History. This will show you all of the commands you have given to Alexa or at least the ones she has heard. This includes all Alexa devices – even third-party speakers.
Tap on the arrow for the recording that you wish to delete.
From there you will see a few options. You will see what you said to Alexa (and the date/time), as well as what Alexa responded with. If she responded incorrectly, this is where you can tell Amazon that she was wrong. At the bottom of the page, there is an option to Delete Voice Recording.
There is no confirmation when you are deleting voice recordings. Tap the “Delete Voice Recording” button and a few seconds later, it is gone. So you will want to be careful pressing that button. But that shouldn’t be a big deal, because you really don’t need to keep your recordings.
How to delete all Alexa Voice Recordings
Amazon has updated the Alexa app, so you can now delete all your history from the app. Here’s how:
Within the Amazon Alexa app, tap on the “More” tab in the bottom right-hand corner and select Settings.
Once you’re in settings, tap on Alexa Privacy. It’ll be towards the bottom, before you get to the Alexa Preferences section.
Tap on Review Voice History. This will show you all of the commands you have given to Alexa or at least the ones she has heard. This includes all Alexa devices – even third-party speakers.
It will show you your voice recordings from today by default. You will want to click on the pull down to change it to All History.
Once you change to All History, it then will populate a new option below, Delete All Recordings For All History.
After tapping on the option to Delete All Recordings For All History, it will then open a dialog box. This is basically telling you that Alexa uses these recordings to learn and that deleting them could degrade your experience. Then ask if you wan to proceed. Just hit Yes, and all of your recordings will be deleted.
It’s worth noting that if you have been using Alexa for a few years, you likely have a ton of voice recordings. And thus it’ll take Amazon a while to delete all of your recordings from its servers. So you may still see some recordings in your Amazon Alexa app.
Wrap Up
It’s fairly simple to delete all of your recordings from Alexa, or even individual ones. If you happen to be worried about your privacy, then this is a good way to get rid of your voice from Amazon’s servers. Though, if you continue to use Alexa, you will need to continue to do that as well. It works the best to do it from Amazon’s website, as the app only allows you to do individual deletions.