A smart speaker listens all day. It answers a few times. The rest of the audio is supposed to stay local, and mostly it does. But every command you speak is recorded, transcribed and stored in the cloud, often for years, and most people never look at that archive once. It’s a full history of what was said in your home, when, and what you asked for. Here’s what the device keeps, how long it survives, and how to get it deleted.
What actually gets stored
Three kinds of data come out of a smart speaker. Here’s each one. The audio recording of each command is the obvious one. Then there’s the transcript: the text the assistant generated from your words, stored alongside the recording. Third is the behavioural data. Every request has a timestamp, and a long run of timestamps is a schedule of when you were home, when you woke up, when the house went quiet.
Some devices also keep a short audio buffer that’s sent to the cloud when the wake word triggers, which sometimes captures a second or two before you spoke. Vendors have added settings to delete that buffer data, and those settings exist precisely because the buffer captures things you didn’t ask the speaker to hear.
The important correction to a common fear: a smart speaker doesn’t record everything continuously and upload it. It listens for a wake word locally, and uploads after the trigger. The privacy problem isn’t total surveillance. It’s the archive nobody audits.
How long it survives
Check the auto-delete setting while you’re in there. Most users have never opened it. Vendors don’t put it in the setup flow on purpose. The default keeps everything because everything is training data.
Both Amazon and Google keep voice recordings until you delete them. There’s no automatic expiry in the default settings. There’s no automatic expiry in the default settings. People who bought a speaker in 2017 often have every command since 2017 still sitting in the app. Some vendors now offer auto-delete options at 3 or 18 months, but those are opt-in. If you never chose them, your archive runs from the day you plugged the device in.
Deleting a recording in the app removes it from your view. Vendor retention policies for legal holds are separate, and a company facing a warrant or a regulator can keep data you already deleted if it was copied to another system first. Assume deletion is advertised for the vendor’s main archive and nothing more.
How to review and delete yours
The archive is in the app. Alexa users find it under activity history in the Alexa app or the account privacy dashboard on the web. Google Home users find it under My Activity, filtered by voice and audio. Both let you play recordings back, which is an uncomfortable experience worth having once. Hearing your own voice from three years ago, half asleep, is what convinces people to clean house.
Both vendors let you delete by time range, all at once, or automatically on a rolling window. Do the mass delete first, then set the auto-delete window. Ten minutes of work removes years of history and caps what accumulates next. Turn on the setting that requires a spoken confirmation before purchases, which closes the voice-purchase hole at the same time.
Humans listened to some of it
Until 2019, some clips were reviewed by contractors and staff to grade the assistant’s answers. Reports in the press exposed it, and both Amazon and Google then paused or reworked the programmes, moving to opt-in consent. If your account predates 2019 and you never opted out, assume a stranger may have heard a clip or two. it’s one more reason the archive deserves a purge, and one more reason the opt-in setting deserves a look.
The subject access route
Under Article 15 of UK GDPR you can request everything the vendor holds about you, including voice recordings, transcripts and the assistant’s logs. One calendar month to respond, first copy free, same as any other data controller. A SAR to a speaker vendor is unusual. That’s why it interests people in disputes. The timestamp trail of voice commands is evidence of occupancy and routine that most people forget exists.
When the police come for it
This isn’t hypothetical. In the 2016 Arkansas murder case, investigators sought recordings from a suspect’s Echo. Amazon initially resisted the request, then turned the data over after the defendant consented. The case set the pattern that still holds. A warrant gets the archive if the vendor has it. Consent from the device owner ends the argument entirely.
For civil disputes the position is simpler. If it’s your account, it’s your data, and you can export it yourself without asking anyone. If you need someone else’s, you need their consent, a court order or disclosure in proceedings.
Hardening the device
Clean up is one half. The other half is reducing what lands in the archive next month. The physical mute button works. Pressing it during private conversations is free. Moving the speaker out of bedrooms costs nothing either. Review the third-party skills and routines installed. Each one is another data path with its own privacy policy. If the device has a camera, as smart displays do, treat it like any other camera in the house. Point it away from private space or unplug it when not in use.
For the wider picture of what records your devices keep, see our pieces on what your smart meter records and CCTV retention and how to get footage.