Amazon gadgets like the Echo store a copy of anything your Alexa asks. That means that a whole collection of voice recordings are recorded for every request or command you give Amazon’s voice assistant.
Amazon says Alexa doesn’t start recording until it thinks you’ve said the wake word (the default is “Alexa”), so it’s not always listening. But it sometimes uses a small number of voice recordings to train the voice assistant to work better, which in rare cases means people could view those recordings to understand if Alexa was misinterpreting a request.
If you use Amazon Alexa a lot, it’s worth knowing how to stop it from storing or using those recordings for training. Here’s what you do.
How to View Your Amazon Alexa Speech History
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 Amazon’s website. Here’s what you can do on your phone:
- Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
- Open the Alexa app.
- Tap ‘More’ at the bottom right.
- Tap ‘Activity’.
- Select the “Speech History” tab at the top.
- Next to ‘View’, choose ‘All History’ and ‘All Devices’.
Now you will see a list of everything that Alexa has recorded. Go through this to play a clip of the audio that Alexa recorded.
How to Delete Your Amazon Alexa Voice History
The easiest way to delete everything at once is to simply say “Alexa, delete everything I’ve ever said”. You can change that to “Alexa, delete what I just said” to delete the last question you asked, or “Alexa, delete everything I said today” to delete everything you said in one day.
However, there is a bonus setting you should know. You can also set Alexa to automatically delete everything after a specified amount of time. I have set mine to delete anything older than every 3 months. To configure this:
- Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
- Open the Alexa app.
- Tap ‘More’ at the bottom right.
- Tap “Settings”
- Choose “Alexa Privacy”
- Tap ‘Manage your Alexa data’
- Change the setting under “Choose how long to save recordings” to your preferred time frame, either indefinitely, for 18 months, for 3 months, or never.
How to keep Amazon from using your Alexa voice recordings for training
Finally, you can prevent your recordings from being used by Amazon to train Alexa. Amazon says that “only an extremely small proportion of voice recordings are manually reviewed” and that if you turn it off, “voice recognition and new features may not work well for you.”
I got this out and it works fine. You may also want to take it off. To do that:
- Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
- Open the Alexa app.
- Tap ‘More’ at the bottom right.
- Tap “Settings”
- Choose “Alexa Privacy”
- Tap ‘Manage your Alexa data’
- Scroll down and turn off the toggle under ‘Help improve Alexa’.
- Make sure the toggle buttons at the bottom for family members (if you have them linked to your account) are also off.