Here is how to stop Google from keeping your voice recordings

If you had ever thought about automating your home, there is a very good chance that your first smart home device will be a smart speaker such as Google based Google Home or Amazon Alexa. These smart devices are capable of playing music from your smartphone and can even respond to your commands to help you to look up weather, check sports scores, etc. To put it simply, having a smart speaker is just like having your own JARVIS – which as you all Marvel fans know is an advanced computerised AI developed by Tony Stark in Iron Man movie.

You just have to say ‘OK Google’, ‘Alexa’ - and your smart speaker will come to life and waiting to hear your command. But as that happens, a large number of users are now worried about their privacy on how much data can be collected by these smart speakers or smart assistants. What can make their life easy is that they can delete these recordings made by Google Assistant. Amazon’s Alexa doesn’t allow you to delete recordings. The Google Assistant allows you to pause the process so that it won’t record your voice in the first place.

Here’s how to do it.

These steps work if you are using a web browser.

Head to Google’s My Activity page

Tap on the ‘hamburger’ icon. Then under the pull-out menu click on ‘Activity Controls.’

Scroll down to label that reads ‘Voice & Audio Activity.’ A blue toggle switch which is turned off by default, turn it on.  Google will then reveal a pop-up message warning of the consequences such as if you pause the recordings, your voice will not be recognised by your Google Assistant. Just toggle it off.

If in future, you have a change of mind, head back to the same place and toggle it back on.