How to Review and Delete Your Alexa History
Want to review what you’ve asked Alexa, delete the more embarrassing inquiries, and tell Amazon to stop listening to your recordings? Here’s how to do it.
Amazon’s Alexa is intended to be a helpful digital home assistant, setting timers, telling you the weather, and buying items off Amazon for you, among other things.
Recently, however, Bloomberg reported that Amazon has thousands of employees listening to Alexa voice recordings every day. And last year, a family in Portland, Oregon, had their conversation recorded by Alexa and sent to a random contact. Luckily, the discussion was innocuous; hardwood floors were on the agenda. But knowing that Alexa might glitch and let everyone in on the inane things you ask her is unnerving.
The fact remains that Alexa does record everything you say, commands that are all stored on your Alexa account. Want to review what you’ve asked Alexa, delete the more embarrassing inquiries, and tell Amazon to stop listening to your recordings? Here’s how.
‘Alexa, Delete Everything I Said Today’
You can now delete Alexa recordings by voice. Once enabled, just say: “Alexa, delete everything I said today” or “Alexa, delete what I just said.”
To enable this, open the Alexa app. Tap the hamburger icon () and select Settings > Alexa Privacy > Review Voice History. Toggle “Enable deletion by voice” to on. Confirm it in the pop-up menu.
Delete Specific Alexa Recordings
What if you asked Alexa a particularly embarrassing thing a few days ago or last month, and you’d like to banish that from your history? You can delete queries one by one or all at once.
Open the Alexa app and select the hamburger menu () on the top left. Tap Settings > Alexa Account.
Delete Voice Recording
Tap History, which will bring up a menu of everything you’ve asked Alexa. Find the offending question and tap it. Here, you can listen to a recording of yourself asking that question (yikes). If you do indeed want to get rid of it, tap Delete Voice Recording.
Delete Recordings From a Specific Date Range
If you’d truly like to begin anew and have Alexa forget everything you’ve asked her for a larger time period, you can do that, too. Return to Settings > Alexa Privacy > Review Voice History. Tap the box under Date Range, where you can select Today, Yesterday, This Week, This Month, All History, or a custom range. Then tap the Delete All Recordings for [selected date range] and they’ll be deleted.
Delete Recordings From the Web
You can also delete your Alexa recordings from your Amazon account on the web. On Amazon.com, click the Manage Your Content and Devices link at the bottom of the page and select the Alexa Privacy tab up top. Here, you can change the date range to review past Alexa queries and delete them one by one or in one fell swoop by date range.
Stop Amazon From Listening to You
Amazon, of course, would prefer that you leave your Alexa recordings intact. “The more data we use to train these systems, the better Alexa works, and training Alexa with voice recordings from a diverse range of customers helps ensure Alexa works well for everyone,” the company says.
But perhaps you don’t want random Amazon employees listening to your recordings, even if they are anonymized. To limit the reach of your Alexa queries, navigate to Settings > Alexa Privacy > Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa > Help Improve Amazon Services and Develop New Features and toggle it to off. Amazon does warn that when you do this, “voice recognition and new features may not work well for you.”
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on August 8, 2019.
