How to easily delete the recordings associated with your Alexa account with just your voice

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With all the recent privacy reports about Amazon’s Alexa, you’d be forgiven if you wanted to throw your Echo speaker into the sea. While that might stop Amazon getting new recordings of your voice, it’s also a bit final and you’ll lose access to a truly useful voice assistant.

Amazon has listened to the criticism of how time-consuming it can be to delete the recordings associated with your account. Starting today, you’ll be able to ask the voice assistant to delete all recordings made on the current day, with more commands coming in the future for fine-grained control. Sure, you still can’t stop Alexa from recording you in the first place, but it’s a good start.

Alexa, delete me

If you want to give Alexa the memory of a goldfish, it’s pretty simple:

1. Make sure your Alexa-enabled device is switched on and say Alexa, delete everything I said today
2. That’s all you need to do, Amazon will delete your Alexa recording history for that day.

Amazon is also working on additional commands, like Alexa, delete what I just said. Hopefully, the ability to specify other time periods will be added in the future, like Alexa, delete everything I’ve said in the last week.

In addition to the new voice commands, Amazon has launched a new Privacy Hub, which has easy links to where you can delete more of your voice recordings, or other privacy-focused tasks.

What do you think? Glad to see Amazon adding these controls or would you like to see more from the feature? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• How to set your Google account to delete itself when you die
• How to connect Alexa to your new smart TV
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• Amazon wants to pay you a measly $25 to 3D-scan your body

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.