How to delete Amazon Alexa records for privacy

Amazon gadgets, such as Echo, save a copy of everything you ask Alexa. This means that there is a whole collection of recorded voice recordings for each request or order you gave to your Amazon voice assistant.

Amazon says that Alexa only starts recording when it thinks you said the watchword (the default is “Alexa”), so it doesn’t listen all the time. But sometimes it uses a small sample of voice recordings to instruct the voice assistant to work better, which means, in rare cases, that people might review these recordings to see if Alexa has misinterpreted a request.

If you use Amazon Alexa a lot, it’s worth knowing how to stop it from saving these recordings or using them for training. Here’s what you do.

There are several ways to view your Amazon Alexa voice history. I prefer to use the Alexa app on my phone, because it’s always in my pocket, but you can also visit the Amazon website. Here’s what to do on your phone:

• Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
• Open the Alexa app.
• Tap “More” in the lower right.
• Touch “Activity”.
• Choose the “Voice History” tab above.
• Next to “Display” choose “All history” and “All devices”.

You will now see a list of everything Alexa has recorded. Go through them to play a snippet of Alexa sound.

The easiest way to delete everything at once is to simply say “Alexa, delete everything I’ve ever said.” You can change this to “Alexa, delete what I just said” to delete the last question you asked, or “Alexa, delete everything I said today” to remove everything you said in one day.

However, there is a bonus setting that you should be aware of. You can also set Alexa to automatically delete everything after a certain period of time. I set it up to delete everything older than every 3 months. To configure this:

• Download the Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
• Open the Alexa app.
• Tap “More” in the lower right.
• Touch “Settings”
• Choose “Alexa Privacy”
• Touch “Manage your Alexa data”
• Change the “Choose how long to save records” setting to your preferred time interval, either indefinitely, for 18 months, for 3 months, or never.

Finally, you can prevent your records from being used by Amazon to train Alexa. Amazon says that “only a very small fraction 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 stopped and it works fine. Maybe you want to too. To do this:

• Download Alexa app for iPhone or Android.
• Open the Alexa app.
• Tap “More” in the lower right.
• Touch “Settings”
• Choose “Alexa Privacy”
• Touch “Manage your Alexa data”
• Scroll down and turn off the toggle button under “Help improve Alexa.”
• Make sure the toggle buttons at the bottom for family members (if you have them attached to your account) are also turned off.