Have an Alexa-enabled Echo device in the living room? Maybe don’t spill your secrets to the voice assistant.
Amazon stated in an email sent to Echo users on Friday that starting March 28, they will no longer be able to opt into a “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” setting to process Alexa requests locally and avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon, per Ars Technica. So by the end of this month, Amazon’s cloud servers will receive recordings of every command sent to Alexa.
Alexa users face a choice: Give Amazon access to everything they say or stop using their Echo device.
Amazon stated in the email that it had decided to end locally processed requests because it was adding generative AI features to Alexa in the coming weeks “that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud.” The Alexa+ AI features, which Amazon announced in late February and are coming to the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 first, give Alexa the power to create quizzes from study guides, come up with travel plans, and summarize footage from Ring security cameras. Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but Prime members get it for free.
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For Alexa+ to work fully, users have to opt to not only send their voice recordings to Amazon, but also to allow the tech giant to save the audio files. A standout feature of Alexa+ is Alexa Voice ID, which enables the voice assistant to recognize who is speaking to it and give person-specific calendar events, music, reminders, and more. If Alexa users ask Amazon not to save any of their voice recordings through settings by March 28, Voice ID may not work.
So now Alexa customers face another choice: Give Amazon the power to save their voice recordings or lose access to a central Alexa+ feature.
Amazon addressed privacy concerns in the email, stating that “Alexa voice requests are always encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud, which was designed with layers of security protections to keep customer information safe.”
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Alexa users may be wary of giving their voice recordings to Amazon, despite the company’s assurances that their data is safe, given Amazon’s track record. In July 2019, Amazon confirmed to legislators that it kept Alexa transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely. Later that year, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees were listening to customer interactions with Alexa and taking notes on the recordings to improve the voice assistant.
In May 2023, Amazon agreed to pay a civil penalty of $25 million to settle a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department accusing it of holding onto Alexa voice interactions with children and using the data for business purposes. Amazon allegedly used children’s data to train its algorithm and did not delete transcripts of children’s conversations with Alexa even after parents attempted to delete them.
Amazon is struggling to make Alexa profitable. The tech giant lost more than $25 billion from Alexa-enabled devices between 2017 and 2021, per The Wall Street Journal, citing internal documents. At the same time, Alexa has reached millions of homes, with Amazon selling more than half a billion Alexa-enabled devices by May 2023.
