How to Delete Voice Recordings From Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri?

How to Delete Voice Recordings From Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri?.

Your personal butler is not entirely loyal to you, they have a habit of, well, gossip. These assistants (Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri) make our lives easier by doing boring tasks for us like setting up reminders, finding the meaning of a word, or even turning on lights, but they come at a price, and that price is you. Your audio commands are recorded and sent to remote servers for “processing”. This is a major privacy issue for some users, which is why Google, Amazon and Apple are now offering a way to remove your conversations with helpers from their servers. Let’s see how to do this.

Whenever you ask your Assistant to do something for you, it basically records your voice and sends it (both audio and transcript) to their servers to sort out the words you just said. Ideally, after executing the command, your voice recordings should be deleted, but Google, Amazon and Apple keep a copy on their server to “improve” their services. However, you can opt out of this practice by following these steps.

1. Delete Siri voice recordings

Unlike Amazon and Google, Apple didn’t offer its users the option to delete their voice recordings until the Guardian posted a story about Siri contractors listening to sensitive information. Fortunately, in their latest iOS update (13.2), you can delete existing entries and opt out of the rating service.

Pull out your iPhone and make sure it is updated to the latest iOS version (13.2 and up). If not, you can go to General Software Update to update your software.

After updating your iPhone, go to Settings Siri & Search tap Siri & Dictionary History Delete Siri & Dictionary History.

You will receive the message “Your request has been received: history will be deleted.” Deleting records from Apple servers will take some time Apple doesn’t tell you when the records will be deleted, we just need to take Apple’s word for it.

Now, this step only deletes past recordings and Siri will continue to record any future conversations. You can’t stop recordings unless you turn off Siri, but you can stop participating in the Siri Improvement Program where contractors listen to your recordings. To opt out of the program, go to Settings Privacy Analytics & Improvements

Switch to Improve Siri & Dictation.

2. Delete audio recordings from Google Assistant

Google offered this feature for a while but never advertised it because you know who doesn’t like free data. Either way, you can easily delete all the conversations you had with Google Assistant or Google Home, either from your web browser or from your phone. In this article, I’ll show you how to delete conversations using the Google Assistant on a mobile device, but the steps are the same for mobile devices.

Take your phone and enter the url myactivity.google.com in your web browser. You will need to sign in with the same Google account associated with your Google Assistant. Once logged in, click on the hamburger menu icon in the upper left corner to open a list of options. Click “Activity Controls” to open a new page.

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On the Action Controls page, scroll down to the Voice and Sound Activity section. Click the Manage Activity button to load the settings page. Here you can remove any voice commands you’ve ever given to the Google Assistant. To delete voice recordings, click the options button as shown in the image below and select Delete Action Before.

You have several options for deleting data by date. You can choose the time slot of your choice or click All Time to delete all records that Google has ever stored on its servers. After selecting an option, click “Delete”.

Now Google is bargaining before it lets you delete posts, giving you a hint on how posts are improving. Click “OK” and then another message appears stating that the process is irreversible. Click Delete to permanently delete the entries from the server.

Now that you’ve deleted all of the entries, you might feel relieved, but wait, that’s not all. Google Assistant will continue to record your future conversations with the assistant, so if you want to maintain privacy, you must turn off this feature.

Luckily, Google allows you to turn off the recording feature entirely, which is great as it shows their strong stance on privacy. You can do this by turning off voice and activity controls. Click the Change Settings button in the Voice & Actions section, then turn off the Voice & Sound Actions switch.