I was on the alexa app, setting up my smart home features, when i noticed a delete voice recordings button. Clicking on the play button, played back my son’s request for the song he wanted playing. But , one thing to be concerned of is , how much does Alexa record, and how to delete any and all recordings stored online.
One thing to not worry about is that Alexa, the voice assistant , doesn’t record everything. Any voice request to be made to the online voice service will be recorded, only when we use the wake word.
Amazon is alt least being transparent about it, google home got themselves into trouble because their service was recording without even without the wake word.
The google home temporarily had the feature disabled , and you had to manually pres the top of the google home, before making a request. That has been all patched up now, and everything’s A-OK. You can see the history of all activity , of yours on google by visiting the address history.google.com.
Now continuing on with voice recordings on Alexa, as i had said earlier, only recordings after the wake words is recorded ,to be processed online. These are listed on the app, and we can play them back, and its quite fun to listen to all that the kids request Alexa to answer. But We want to know how we can delete these recordings.
Press the hamburger menu on the top left, and choose settings. Scroll down to history, and we can see the request voice recordings in a list.
Tap on delete voice recordings and it’s erased.
This is going to be cumbersome, so to mass purge the voice data, visit amazon.in/mycd
on any browser, or if you are in the US amazon.com/mycd
Login to your amazon account.
Click on Your devices, select the device you want to manage, such as an amazon dot or echo or echo plus. In the below, click on manage voice recordings.
Amazon pop’s up a message , indicating if you are sure that you want to delete the recordings, as amazon keeps the recordings to learn our voice and improve the accuracy of the results. If you still don’t want them, click delete.
Also if you don’t want the Echo listening in , when not required, tap the microphone button on the top. This disables the microphone on the echo, and it echo doesn’t respond to requests anymore. We know its disabled, because of the red light ring around the top of the device.
Now that you know how to purge the history, you can do it once in a while when necessary.
Vinayak Nair is a self-confessed geek from the days when computer memory was measured in Kilobytes. I create YouTube videos on 3D Printing, DIY Projects, Everyday tech reviews and also delve into gaming.
