Amazon to Collect All Echo Voice Recordings, With No Option for Local Processing

Amazon has stated that it will, rather forcefully, collect all Echo voice recordings and that no requests will be processed locally moving forward. This move comes after Amazon announced plans to integrate genAI into the Alexa platform.

Echo’s Voice Recordings Will Now Be Processed in Amazon’s Cloud, But Can Be Deleted After Processing

Echo users will now have to submit to having their voice requests processed on Amazon’s cloud. In an email to Echo users, the company stated that the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” feature will no longer be available and that if no action is taken, the settings will default to “Don’t save recordings,” meaning each request will be deleted after being processed on the cloud.

It is important to note that Alexa’s Voice ID requires recordings to be saved to the cloud. The feature allows Alexa to identify the person talking to it and hence bases its responses on a more personalized manner.

With Amazon’s history of storing children’s recordings and allowing employees to listen to user recordings, the idea of routing all recordings through the cloud is daunting, to say the least. Recordings from the device have previously been used in criminal trials and reviewed by Amazon employees to train NLP models.

Users will now have to pick and choose how they want their private data and household voice recordings to be processed. This, of course, is in connection with the upcoming Alexa+, which is expected to be announced in the coming days.

This is all we know for now, but rest assured that we will keep you updated as new information becomes available.