To make its services smarter, Google analyzes the audio recordings of its users, so today I’ll explain how to delete them. Since smartphones and home automation devices populate our lives, the Android ecosystem (but also iOS) has served Big G for the development of its technologies.
It was May 2016 when the Google Assistant was announced at the annual developer conference, bringing the concept of a voice assistant to the general public. Since that moment, the Google assistant has depopulated the billions of Android smartphones circulating all over the world, but not only.
Let’s think, for example, of smart speakers such as Google Home, Home Mini, Nest Mini and Nest Audio: their purpose is precisely to make us interact vocally with the services operated by Google.
Why does Google save my recordings?
If you have an Android smartphone (but also iOS), you have probably used voice commands to use apps such as Assistant, Maps or Google search. Here, every time you interact vocally with one of these apps, Google is allowed to save those audio recordings. As the company claims, those recordings help it develop and improve its audio recognition technologies and the Google services that use them.
Google claims that these records and the information they convey are secure and private in their Google account. The way in which they are used is anonymous, extrapolating only some audio clips unrelated to the account of origin. In this way, the analytics tools cannot know who the speaking user is. These clips are taken and analyzed by Google employees to analyze languages, dialects and accents and improve the speech recognition of the platform.
How to find and delete Google registrations
If you had enabled the voice to save audio recordings (more info in the next paragraph), here’s where you can find them:
- Open your Google account
- Go to the Data and privacy section
- Click on Web & App Activity in the History Settings section
- Click on Manage all web and app activity
On the next screen, you’ll have a list of all your saved activities, including audio recordings saved via Assistant, Maps, and Google search (marked with a microphone icon). From here you can cancel any activity by clicking on the X on the right and confirming the cancellation.
Here’s what to do if you want to delete everything in one click. However, be careful because this will delete all the activities saved by Google, not just the audio recordings.
- Open your Google account
- Go to the Data and privacy section
- Click on Web & App Activity in the History Settings section
- Click on Manage all web and app activity
- Under the bar Search in your activities click on Delete
- Select the item From the beginning
Google will show you a list of all of its products that you have used: Assistant, Chrome, Gmail, Play Store, Maps, Search, and so on. You can select and/or deselect which apps to clear your activities, including audio recordings.
How to prevent Google from saving these recordings
If you don’t want Google to save your recordings from here on out, you can do it. Here’s how to do it:
- Open your Google account
- Go to the Data and privacy section
- Click on Web & App Activity in the History Settings section
- Remove the toggle from Include audio recordings
In this way, the audio recordings in Google search, Maps and Assistant will not be saved by Google but will be immediately deleted.