Published 15:19 IST, February 20th 2020
Alexa is recording your conversations, here's how you can listen and delete them
Amazon's Alexa works by voice command and sometimes it picks up conversations and records them, however, one can now delete any unexpected recordings.
- Tech
- 3 min read
Amazon's Alexa works by voice command and sometimes it picks up conversations and records them, however, one can now delete any unexpected recordings. Alexa is a smart assistant and it works on 'wake words' which means that sometimes it can pick up false ones when one is not even interacting with the device. The news of voice recordings came after a former Amazon employee told an international media outlet that he always turns his Alexa off to stop strangers from listening in on his conversations.
However, an Amazon spokesperson reportedly said that the voice recording help improves Alexa as they manually review and annotate a small fraction of one per cent of Alexa requests. He further specified that the access to data annotation tools is only granted to a limited number of employees who require them to improve the service and the annotation process also does not associate voice recordings with any customer identifiable information. Furthermore, he clarified that the customers can even opt-out of having their voice recordings included in the fraction of one per cent of voice recording that gets reviewed.
How to find and delete voice recordings
To find the voice recordings one can easily,
- Open the Alexa app on the smartphone or tablet.
- Tap into the menu bar on the left-hand side and then tap Settings.
- Next, tap Alexa Privacy, and then go into Review Voice History.
- On the other hand, to delete audio recordings, individually tap on the empty boxes next to each recording to 'tick' them.
- Then go to the top of the list and press 'Delete Selected Recordings' to delete those individual files.
- One can also delete all the voice recordings by selecting a date range and pressing 'Delete All Recordings'.
The user also has the option of not having their voice recorded ever and all one has to do it to go to 'Alexa Privacy' on the app and 'Manage How Your Data improves Alexa', which will then show you an explanation of the policy. The user can then uncheck the box called 'Help Improve Amazon Services and Develop New Features' so that none of the recordings can be sent off.
Updated 15:19 IST, February 20th 2020