It is possible that among the things you received or gave away for Christmas there was a Google Home device or an Amazon Echo, the voice assistants for the home produced by Google and Amazon respectively. Both work more or less in the same way: after connecting them to the power grid and to a Wi-Fi network, these devices are constantly listening – unless you turn them off – and use voice recognition to respond to user requests, formulated as normal conversation phrases, and execute them.
In the case of Google Home you have to start the question by saying “Ok Google” or “Hey Google”, while for the Amazon Echo just say the name “Alexa”, the name of the voice assistant. You can ask for the most varied things, from weather forecasts, to the reproduction of a song; or you can connect them to objects specially designed to make the home “smart”, such as Wi-Fi light bulbs and thermostats, or devices to keep an eye on babies. However, it is good to know that all the questions are recorded by the devices, and stored in their memory, so here are some tips on how to keep an eye on the history of your commands.
In the case of the Amazon Echo it is not very difficult: in fact, just go to the Alexa app of your smartphone or tablet, enter the menu accessed at the top left, select “Settings”, then “Alexa Account” and finally “Chronology”. Here you can see all your activities, from searches to the songs played, and choose whether to keep them, maybe listen to your own recorded voice or give feedback to the system, or delete them.
In the case of Google Home devices, the procedure is not as simple. First you need to go to your Google account page, which can be reached at myaccount.google.com, and select the “Data and personalization” option in the right menu, and then “Manage activities”. A screen will open that collects all the searches made on Google over the years, but also the videos watched on YouTube, the places searched on Google Maps and the history of the places from which you connected.
Among the various options there is also “Voice and audio activity”, which is the one in which all the voice conversations made with Google Home are recorded. By clicking on the top right of each search you can know the details, such as the place where it was carried out, or listen to it. To delete them you can select them individually, deleting them one by one, or you can select “Delete by” in the menu on the left, and choose whether to delete today's, yesterday's, the last 7 or 30 days, or all the searches of all time. Once a search is canceled, it will no longer be recoverable.
