A woman from Portland, Oregon, last year discovered that her Amazon ‘Echo’ had actually recorded a conversation between her and her husband. This was not all because Echo then forwarded that conversation to one of their contacts. The woman first thought that she had been hacked. However, as it turned out, that Alexa was actually being a little too helpful for them.

Amazon spokesperson; Shelby Lichliter described this incident to Seattle’s KIRO 7 as follows,

“Echo actually woke up due to a word in the background that sounded like Alexa. Then this subsequent conversation between the two people was heard as a ‘send message’ request by the Echo. At that point during the conversation, Alexa actually sounded out loud, ‘To Whom?’ at that point then, the background voice actually said a name that was a name in the customer’s contact list. Alex, then asked if the contact name was right? Alexa then heard in the background conversation the word ‘right’. Due to this unlikely string of events, the conversation was then sent to that contact name. While all of this is highly unlikely, we are now making efforts to make this situation less likely to happen in future.”

While this explanation actually does make quite a lot of sense, it still is creepy like hell.

According to a poll back in 2018, nearly 22 percent of the participants of the poll reported to be using the smart home assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home while another 47 percent told that they had been using a digital personal assistant on their Smartphones.

What if you are also being recorded?

If you are also among this group of people, then what can you actually do to attain a level of control over such situations to happen or do what with the information that these smart assistants absorb?

What to do to avoid getting send your recordings to others?

If any of you have the Amazon Echo or the Google Home or other such home assistants, then you can start by deleting the voice recordings.

How to stop your conversations from getting recorded:-

To stop the home assistants from recording your conversations do the following.

Amazon Echo:-

For those who are using home assistants like Amazon Echo, they should go first to the Alexa app and follow these steps.

Go to the ‘Settings’
Go to ‘History’
Delete all the recordings in the queue

Google Home:-

For the Google Home Assistant do the following steps.

Go to “myactivity.google.com”
Chose ‘Filter by Date and Product’
Hit the checkmark for ‘Voice and Audio’
Hit ‘Delete’

Key Phrases to activate Home Assistants:-

For all of the home assistants out there, there is a key phrase for each of them that wakes them up and start working automatically. They start working whether you want them to or not. Few of the keyphrases for the Home Assistants are as follows.

Alexa
OK Google
Hey Siri
Hey Cortana

There are also ways to disable these phrases.

Ways to disable the Key Phrases for Home Assistants:-

To silence the home assistants’ key phrases follow these individual steps for each of them as follows.

To silence Siri:-

In order to silence the “Hey Siri’ key phrase follow these steps.

Got to device ‘Settings’
Got to ‘General’ settings
Wipe the ‘Hey Siri’ button to off

To silence Google Home:-

In order to silence the “OK Google” key phrase for ‘Google Home’ follow these steps.

Go to ‘myactivity.google.com’ page
Go to ‘Menu’
Click the ‘Activity Controls’
Got to ‘Voice & Audio’ tab
Select ‘Pause Voice & Audio Activity’

To silence Cortana:-

In order to silence the “Hey Cortana” key phrase for ‘Cortana’ follow these steps.

If the user is using the Windows Computer, chose the ‘Notebook Icon’
Go to ‘Settings’
Choose ‘Hey Cortana’ to turn it off

To silence Amazon Echo:-

In order to silence the “Alexa” key phrase for ‘Amazon Echo’ follow these steps.

Switch off the microphone button located at the top of the device manually

Home Assistants that allow manual recordings:-

Some major home assistants like the following that records the user’s conversation automatically.

Amazon Echo
Google Home
Cortana
Siri

In addition to these major home assistants, there are also some home assistants like “Mycroft”, which is a crowdfunded open source AI assistant, that have the function to turn off both microphones and delete the recordings. These home assistants allow the user to have the option to make storage of their conversations instead of doing it automatically for them.