Smart assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa have become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives.
But did you know that these devices may record and store your conversations?
While smart assistants make our lives easier, there's always the issue of privacy.
Thankfully for Alexa users, there’s an easy way to listen to the recordings of your conversations, and then to delete them for good, the Mirror reports.
However, before you go ahead and delete your recordings, it’s good to be aware exactly why Amazon uses them in the first place.
Amazon explained: “Voice recordings are used to improve the accuracy of your interactions with Alexa. Deleting voice recordings associated with your account may degrade your experience.”
Here’s a simple guide for how to listen to Alexa’s recordings of your conversations and delete them.
How to delete your Alexa recordings
- Open the Alexa app
- Go to the Settings menu
- Select Settings
- Select Alexa Privacy, and then select an entry or review a specific date range
- Tap the text you want to hear, and then click the Play icon
- If you want to delete a recording, simply tick the empty box next to it, and tap ‘Delete Selected Recordings’
Alternatively, you can go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexaprivacysettings on your web browser to change your settings.
How to turn off human review
Since last year, Amazon has also given Alexa users the ability to opt out of their voice recordings being manually reviews by the company’s human workers.
To turn off human review, open the Alexa app on your smartphone and go to settings.
Then go to Alexa privacy and select "Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa".
You'll find a page that explains: "Training Alexa with recordings from a diverse range of customers helps ensure Alexa works well for everyone.
"With this setting on, your voice recordings may be used to develop new features and manually reviewed to help improve our services.
"Only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings are manually reviewed."
Amazon warns you that turning the setting off will mean "new features may not work well for you".
But if you would rather your private recordings remained private, simply flick the switch off.
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