Does Alexa store your voice recordings?

Alexa stores your voice recordings unless you have chosen not to save them. Amazon told Echo owners in 2025 that recordings would go to the cloud for processing, and each recording is then either kept under your setting or deleted after the request is processed. The setting decides the outcome, so the first thing to check is what your account says, not what the default might be.

Amazon sends your recordings to the cloud, and your setting decides what is kept

Amazon told Echo owners that from March 28, 2025, their voice recordings would be sent to and processed in the cloud, and deleted after Alexa processes the requests ¹. The message went by email to affected owners, so check the notice Amazon sent you to see whether your device is covered.

Amazon's privacy post ties deletion right after each request to one setting, so that setting decides what is kept. It gives three controls:

• Don't save. If you choose not to save your voice recordings, they are deleted automatically after Alexa processes each request ².
• Auto-delete. You can keep saving recordings and have them deleted automatically on an ongoing basis, either every three months or every 18 months ³.
• Transcripts. Transcripts of your requests remain available for 30 days before Amazon begins to delete them automatically ⁴. The post does not say whether the transcripts leave Amazon's systems at the same time.

Amazon's post does not say which of these is the default, so the first step is to read your own setting.

Alexa does not record everything, but it wakes up without the wake word

Storing recordings and recording all the time are different. A 2020 study of smart speakers exposed to TV audio found no evidence that the devices constantly record conversations ⁵. The devices did wake up frequently, often for short intervals.

The study tested Echo Dots, and the rate was not zero. Across all the shows, the second-generation Echo Dot averaged 0.40 activations per hour, tied with the Harman Kardon Invoke for the highest rate among the devices tested ⁶. The study measured those activations with TV audio in a lab, so a home is not the same test, and it covers devices from 2019 and 2020 only.

For storage, the point is simple. An activation is a moment when the device starts listening, so the save setting matters even when you did not mean to speak to it.

Human review was an opt-out choice, and it is worth checking

Recordings can also be read by people, not only stored. In August 2019 Amazon changed Alexa's settings so that users could opt out of having their voice recordings manually reviewed by its human workers. The change took effect on August 2, 2019, after Bloomberg reported the practice ⁷. The article does not say how many recordings were reviewed, so treat the opt-out as a setting to check, not as proof of how much review happens now.

It depends on your device, your settings and your request

What to do

1. Open the Alexa app, tap More, then Settings, then Alexa Privacy, and open Manage Your Alexa Data. The same settings are on Alexa Privacy Settings online, as Amazon's privacy post describes.
2. Choose Don't save if you do not need recordings kept, or set auto-delete to three months ³ if you want some history.
3. Delete what is already stored. Amazon's post says you can delete recordings one by one, by date range, by device, or all at once.
4. Check the setting again after app updates, since the screens and options can move.

If you dictate sensitive text, Alexa is not the right tool for it. A dictation app that processes speech on your computer keeps the audio there, and Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows. You can see the download options.

For the other companies, read the question on Google and voice recordings and the question on Microsoft and voice recordings. For a fuller comparison, read our guide to voice data retention, part of our overview of speech to text privacy. To delete your recordings from several companies at once, see how to delete voice recordings.