You Can Now Stop Human Reviews Of Amazon Alexa Recordings, Here's How

On Friday, Amazon said that customers can now disable human review of their Alexa recordings, this move comes after the same actions from Google and Siri.

The change results from several news reports about how these tech giants use human labor to listen to customer recordings for improving their software. Due to this practice, consumers are concerned about how their data and voices are being used, as well as mention uncomfortable situations where companies can hear private conversations and voices of children.

Google, Amazon, and Apple all made the decision to change this over the past day, suggesting a policy shift as the companies attempt to improve their assistants’ privacy as and respond to the decrease in customer bases.

Back in May, Amazon added new privacy features to its digital assistant Alexa, which include allowing users to remove their voice recordings of the day just by asking the assistant rather than having to visit amazon’s website. With these changes, the company likely hopes to strengthen the presence of voice assistants and smart speakers in the market as well as increase consumer trust.

Bloomberg reported that Amazon’s new policy took effect starting Friday. Meanwhile, Apple announced to suspend human reviews of Siri recordings across the world. In the same move, Google said it put a pause to its human reviews process globally following an incident where one of its contractors leaked voice recordings to a news organization in Belgium.

According to a Friday emailed statement from an Amazon spokesperson:

Since stories about human reviews of Alexa recordings, the company has claimed to review just a small fraction of total recording using humans.

To stop human reviews of Alexa recordings, you need to open Alexa Privacy settings on the Alexa app or amazon’s website. Next, toggle off Help Improve Amazon Services and Develop New Features in Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa.

The company says on that page that just a tiny part of the total numbers of recordings are review manually and that it uses the info to improve the voice assistant’s services as well as create new features. It is warned by the firm that turning off the setting may reduce the assistant’s capability of voice recognition and also new features.