How to Delete Every Conversation Recorded by Your Amazon Echo

Given recent reports of Amazon Echo home assistants recording users without their knowledge, here’s how you can find and delete all comments recorded by the device.

A recent report claimed that a family in Oregon received a shock when a family friend called to inform them that he had just heard their entire conversation — because their Amazon Echo home assistant recorded and sent him the audio in a worrying glitch. The mother of the family, only identified as Danielle, said: “My husband and I would joke and say, ‘I’d bet these devices are listening to what we’re saying,’” she clarified that the device never stated that it was recording the family. “We unplugged all of them, and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house. At first, my husband was, like, ‘no you didn’t!’ And the (recipient of the message) said ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘oh gosh, you really did hear us.’”

This has made those that were already skeptical of the “always on” home assistant even more worried about their privacy around these devices. Here is how you can locate and delete all of the commands that the Echo device has recorded.

Open the Amazon Echo app for iOS or Android:
Once the app is open, select the three-lined icon in the top left corner and press settings in the popup window:

On the settings page, scroll down and select ‘History’:

This will bring you to a page where you can see all the recent commands recorded by the Echo device:

Scroll through the page to see all commands recorded by the Echo:

On this page, individual commands can be deleted

Select a command to delete it:

After selecting a command simply press the “Delete Voice Recordings” button to remove it from the device’s memory:

This is how Amazon Echo users can delete single voice recordings from their device, if a user wants to delete all of the recordings on the device they can visit Amazon’s Manage Your Content and Devices page where they can wipe the device entirely. Amazon has, however, warned that doing so  “may degrade your Alexa experience.”