How to delete Amazon Alexa recordings for privacy

Amazon gadgets like Echo save a copy of everything you ask Alexa. This means that there is an entire collection of recorded voice recordings for each request or command you gave to Amazon’s voice assistant.

Amazon says that Alexa only starts recording when it thinks you said the activation word (the default is “Alexa”), so it’s not listening all the time. But sometimes it uses a small sample of voice recordings to train the voice assistant to work better, which means that, in rare cases, humans can review these recordings to understand whether Alexa has misinterpreted a request.

If you use Amazon Alexa a lot, it’s worth knowing how to stop you from saving these recordings or using them for training. Here’s what you do.

There are several ways to view your Amazon Alexa voice history. I prefer to use the Alexa app on my phone, as it’s always in my pocket, but you can also visit the Amazon website. Here’s what to do on your phone:

• Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
• Open the Alexa app.
• Touch “More” in the bottom right corner.
• Touch “Activity”.
• Choose the “Voice History” tab at the top.
• Next to “Showing”, choose “All history” and “All devices”.

Now you will see a list of everything Alexa has registered. Go through them to play a portion of the audio Alexa recorded.

The easiest way to delete everything at once is to simply say “Alexa, delete everything I already said”. You can change to “Alexa, delete what I just said” to delete the last question you asked, or “Alexa, delete everything I said today” to remove everything you said in a single day.

However, there is a bonus setting that you should be aware of. You can also configure Alexa to automatically delete everything after a certain time. I have mine set up to delete everything older than every 3 months. To configure this:

• Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
• Open the Alexa app.
• Touch “More” in the bottom right corner.
• Touch “Settings”
• Choose “Alexa Privacy”
• Tap on “Manage your Alexa data”
• Change the setting under “Choose how long to save your recordings” for the time period you prefer, either indefinitely, for 18 months, for 3 months or never.

Finally, you can prevent your recordings from being used by Amazon to train Alexa. Amazon says that “only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings are manually reviewed” and that, if you turn it off, “speech recognition and new features may not work well for you”.

I hung up and it works fine. You may also want this. Do that:

• Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
• Open the Alexa app.
• Touch “More” in the bottom right corner.
• Touch “Settings”
• Choose “Alexa Privacy”
• Tap on “Manage your Alexa data”
• Scroll down and disable the toggle button under “Help improve Alexa.”
• Make sure the toggle buttons at the bottom for family members (if you have them attached to your account) are also turned off.