How to tell Alexa to delete what you say
There’s no denying it: Alexa is listening to you all the time. Every day, thousands of Amazon employees around the world analyze audio clips from users like you. Sometimes, they pick up private and personal audio.
Tap or click here to find out what your Amazon Echo can discover about your life by listening in. (Hint: It’s a lot.) Luckily, we know a trick you can use to wipe the slate clean every day.
Amazon released a privacy-protecting feature that allows you to command the voice assistant to delete a recent comment. You can say, “Alexa, delete everything I said today.” If you want to completely wipe the slate clean, you can even clear out all your stored recordings.
Want to revisit your voice history? Follow these steps
Before you start deleting your history, you may want to take a trip back to the past. Maybe you left some voice notes or you just want to enjoy the sound of your own voice. Either way, Amazon lets you review, listen to, or delete your voice recording history through the app or a browser.
If you want to listen in on your PC, open up your web browser and head to https://www.amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings. Once you log in, you can review every old recording Alexa saved.
Do this to review your history through the app:
- Open the Alexa app. Tap on More (which has three vertical lines).
- Hit Settings.
- Select Alexa Privacy.
After that, you can select a specific entry to listen to. You can even review a specific date range to listen to.
Now that you can listen back to old recordings, you’ll see the option to Delete Selected Recordings. Select past voice clips and you can delete them in a snap. Or you could save time and delete your entire voice history.
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Here’s exactly what to do
To take advantage of this helpful feature, you’ll have to dig through your account preferences. To set your account to automatically delete Alexa’s voice recordings, follow these steps:
- Open the Alexa app.
- Tap More and select Settings.
- Select Alexa Privacy.
- Select Manage Your Alexa Data.
- Go to Automatically delete recordings, then select Off to enable the setting.
- Choose a time period to keep your voice recordings and then select Confirm.
If you want to use the website, go to amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings and once again slide the toggle.
Amazon warns that “deleting voice recordings may degrade your Alexa experience.” That means the artificial intelligence that personalizes Alexa won’t be as helpful because its ability to learn from your commands will diminish.
Amazon warns you that deleting voice records could “degrade your experience.” That’s because Amazon uses your recordings to improve Alexa’s accuracy. It all comes down to your priorities. Which is more important to you: convenience or security?
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Tags: AI (artificial intelligence), Amazon, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Echo, apps, browser, commands, convenience, privacy, security, voice assistant, voice recording, voice recordings, web browser