Is Alexa listening in on more than she should be? It’s a question millions of Amazon Echo owners have to answer for themselves in the wake of several revelations regarding the amount of audio the retail giant is collecting and what it may be doing with it.
What is Amazon doing with recordings from your Echo?
Amazon doesn’t specifiially say humans are listening to recordings conversations picked up by Alexa, according to USA today. “We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of frequently asked questions.
In a statement to Time, the company claims they’re being responsible with your recordings:
“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.
Amazon Alexa: How to listen to your recordings and delete them forever
Now that you have the back story, you may want to know exactly what Alexa has been recording in your home! Here’s how to find out…
From the Alexa app, click on “Settings”
Select “Alexa Account”
Select “Alexa Privacy”
Select “Review Voice History”
Use the pulldown menu to select the date range you want to review
Delete recordings from anytime from today to your entire history
You have another option…
If you’ve had an Amazon Echo for a long time, you could spend hours going through each individual recording from every time you shouted “Alexa” across the room!
To delete all voice recordings at once, visit the “Manage Your Content and Devices” page at Amazon.com.
From there, click on the “Devices” tab, select an Alexa-enabled product and click “Device Actions” to find the “Delete All Recordings” option.
Amazon’s FAQ page says you can also contact customer service to have your recordings deleted.
As we mentioned before, the company says it keeps voice recordings to learn your voice and how you speak to improve the accuracy of the results that your device provides.
As a result, Amazon says that deleting voice recordings could degrade your Alexa experience.
