Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa often rely on troves of data for making them smarter. Some of this data also comes from the interactions that Alexa, or any other virtual assistant, has with its humans via the smart home devices.
Last month, a Bloomberg report indicated that thousands of Alexa reviewers around the world – including the contractual and full-time workers employed in India, Costa Rica, Boston and Romania — listen to conversations between Alexa and her users in a bid to make her smarter. These Alexa reviewers, as the report indicated analyse anywhere between 100 to 1,000 audio clips a day on an average in a nine-hour long shift depending on how frequently users are interacting with Alexa and they.
Needless to say that Alexa reviewers are listening to you – quite literally. But if you don’t want Alexa reviewers to listen to your conversations and use your Alexa recordings for making Alexa smarter, you can simply do so by revoking your permission in your Alexa app.
Here’s what you need to do:
– Open Alexa app on your smartphone.
– Tap on the three bars on the top left corner of the app to access the Settings menu.
– Now tap on the Settings option.
– In the Settings menu tap on the Alexa Account option to assess your settings pertaining to Amazon’s virtual assistant.
– Scroll down and tap on Alexa Privacy option.
Here you can review your Alexa voice history, manage Alexa skill permissions and even manage the history pertaining to your smart home devices linked with Alexa.
– Here, tap on Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa option.
This is where you get to decide if you don’t want Alexa’s developers not to use your voice data for making Alexa smarter.
– Toggle the Help Develop New Fetaures switch and you are done!
More Alexa options
Apart from prohibiting Amazon from reviewing your your Alexa recordings and using them for making its virtual assistant smarter, you can also tweak some settings within your Alexa app to delete select recordings or even all your Alexa recordings for good. Here’s how:
– Open Alexa Privacy settings in the Alexa Account settings.
– Now tap on Review Voice History option.
– In the Date Range select All History.
Here you can choose to either select recordings and delete them collectively or delete a particular recording.
– To delete all recordings tap on Delete All Recordings for All History option.
– A dialog box will then ask you to confirm your decision. Tap on Yes and you are good to go.
