Amazon Will Listen to All Your Voice Recordings If You Use Alexa+

Amazon’s AI-enhanced Alexa assistant is going to need all your voice recordings, and there’s nothing you can do about it. An email sent to Alexa users notes the online retail giant is ending one of its few privacy provisions about recorded voice data in the lead up to Alexa+. The only way to make sure Amazon doesn’t get a hold of any of your vocals may be to quit using Alexa entirely. Gizmodo reached out to Amazon for confirmation, though we did not immediately hear back.

You can find the full email on Reddit (as first reported by Ars Technica), which plainly states the “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” setting on Alexa is being discontinued on March 28. Anybody who has the setting enabled will have it automatically revoked, and Amazon will then be able to process your voice recordings. Amazon claims it will delete the recordings once it’s done processing your request.

“As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature,” the email reads. “If you do not take action, your Alexa Settings will automatically be updated to ‘Don’t save recordings.’ This means that, starting on March 28, your voice recording will be sent to and processed in the cloud, and they will be deleted after Alexa processes your requests. any previously saved voice recordings will also be deleted.”

Alexa+, Amazon’s upcoming AI version of its normally inconsistent voice assistant, is supposed to allow for far more utility than it had in the past. The new assistant should be able to order groceries via multiple apps including Amazon Fresh and Instacart for you based on broad requests like “get me all the ingredients I need to make a pizza at home.” It’s supposed to set smart home routines, access your security footage, and look for Prime Video content in a conversational manner. The other big headline feature is Voice ID, where Amazon claims Alexa can identify who is speaking to it. The AI theoretically should  learn users’ habits over time and tailor its responses to each individual.

Alexa+ is supposed to come to all current Echo Show devices and will supposedly make its way to future Echo products as well. If you have an Amazon Prime account, you’ll get immediate access to Alexa+. Without the subscription, you’ll need to cough up another $20 a month for the sake of talking to AI-infused Alexa. The tradeoff is now you will have to offer your vocals to the online retail giant for it to do as it pleases.

There are more than a few reasons you don’t want Amazon anywhere near your voice data. For years, Amazon’s default setting gave workers access to user data, even offering some the ability to listen to users’ Alexa recordings. In 2023, the company paid out $25 million to the Federal Trade Commission over allegations it gave employees access to children’ s voice data and Ring camera footage. For its part, Amazon said it had changed its data practices to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, aka COPPA. Amazon’s privacy track record is spotty, at best. The company has long been obsessed with users’ voice data. In 2023, Amazon revealed it was using Alexa voice recordings to help train its AI. Gizmodo reached out to Amazon to confirm whether Alexa+ voice recordings will also be used to train the company’s AI models. We will update this story once we hear back.

Unlike Apple, which made big claims about data protections with its “private cloud compute” system for processing cloud-based AI requests anonymously, Amazon has made far fewer overtures to keeping user data safe. Smaller AI models can run on-device, but those few examples we have of on-device capabilities from the likes of Windows Copilot+ laptops or Gemini on Samsung Galaxy S25 phones are—in their current iteration—little more than gimmicks. Alexa+ wants to be the first instance of true assistant AI with cross-app capabilities, but it may also prove a privacy nightmare from a company that has  routinely failed to protect users’ data.