How to delete all Google Home voice recordings

Google’s smart speakers respond to voice commands and store all that voice data on Google’s servers. For your safety, here’s how to delete those recordings. Smart speakers like Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod, and Google Home are becoming more and more popular, especially as a means of listening to music. But they do a lot more, from answering questions to controlling the smart home.

These speakers have microphones that wait for a “wake word” or phrase that puts the speaker into full listening mode. On Google Home devices, which use the Google Assistant, the activation word is “Hey Google” or “Ok Google”, depending on your preferences. (You can turn off active listening if you want, though it defeats the purpose of having a smart speaker.)

Read also: How to add Google Home to Samsung SmartThings

To learn more about you and provide the best answers (and ads), Google archives the audio of your questions and instructions to the Google Assistant. Were you shocked? Companies like Google and its like are not in the habit of deleting your personal data if you don’t ask.

Echo devices have had problems with this; starting this summer, so will Google (and Microsoft and Apple).

Thankfully, just as you can clear your history with Alexa on the Amazon Echo, so you can also clear the history of everything you’ve told the Google Assistant, either via Google Home or even via your smartphone.

Log in to My Business

The easiest way to find recordings for your Google Assistant account is to visit MyActivity.Google.com. You can also find it by going to Google.com, logging into your Google account, clicking your photo in the top right, and selecting Google Account> Personal information and privacy> Manage your business on Google. On the next page, click Go to My Activities.

My mobile business

The steps are almost the same on a mobile device. In the Google app on iOS, click on your avatar and follow this path: Manage your Google account> Personal information and privacy> My activities. You will get the same page that you find on the desktop.

Voice activity filter

On the My Activities page, you can scroll and scroll and scroll by days and days and days. All the information Google has about you is all here. For voice recordings only, look under the search box, where it says + Filter by date and product. Click here, leave the date set to “Always”. Then uncheck All products and put a check mark next to Assistant and Voice and audio.

Read: How to connect Google Home to Bluetooth speakers

Play your voice

Do you know why everyone hates hearing the sound of their own voices? There is a scientific reason for this; something to do with the bones in the ear. They can’t edit it for you. But I can tell you that if you filter the Assistant / Voice entries in your Google Personal Activities page, you can hear yourself talking to Google Home or Google Assistant… you will hear some good ones.

Delete individual recordings

Each individual item in My Activities has its own menu, indicated by the three-dot menu (). Sign in to see details, such as which device or app heard the command or to delete the voice. Sometimes the page contains a lot of things you said together, especially if you said them one after the other, in terms of time.

You can click on the menu and select Delete either way. A warning will appear: the deleted data cannot be recovered. Since that’s the point, click Delete.

Filter by date

You may not want to delete all the voice recordings, maybe just one or two in particular, sometimes you know you said something stupid or incriminating after “Hey Google”. If you know the date on which it was spoken, you can narrow your search to a specific day or to a stretch of days. You cannot, however, restrict it to a specific time. So, if you talk to Google Home all day, constantly, you’ll have to search a little more.

Delete all voice recordings

If you only filter by Product (Google Assistant and Voice & Audio), the list not only shows individual items, but also offers a menu next to each new day in the list. In this way, an entire day of recorded data can be deleted.

But if you really want to delete all those recordings, forever, click the “Delete activity by” link in the left navigation bar. Set a time interval or use the “Always” option. Choose a product (you cannot combine Assistant and Voice and Audio here). Click Delete when ready.

Restrict Google’s record keeping

Google now allows you to set up an automatic deletion of your business on some of its services. It has been implemented for location history and web and app activity; eventually, you will be able to use the steps below to get rid of the voice and audio activity.

In the Google Assistant mobile app, click on your face in the top right, then go to You> Your Data in Assistant> My Activities. On the desktop, go to Activity Controls.

Scroll down and you’ll see tabs for various types of businesses. If you click on Web & App Activity, for example, you will see an option for “Choose how long to keep” the collected data: the options are 3 months, 18 months, or keep them until they are manually deleted. There isn’t an option in Voice and Audio Activity yet, but Google says it’s on the way.