Amazon now allows you to stop the human revision of your Alexa records

Amazon announced Friday that it would now let its customers disable human review of their Alexa records, following similar steps by Apple for Siri and Google for its badistant.

This change follows a series of stories highlighting how these three companies are using people to listen to certain customer records to improve their software. The practice raised concerns among consumers about how their voices and data were being used, and pointed to sometimes uncomfortable situations in which children's voices or private conversations could be heard in recordings.

These three companies have decided to make these changes over the past day, which means a sudden change in policy as they strive to improve the privacy of their voice badistants and respond to adverse consumer reactions. The move follows The decision of Amazon in May to add new privacy features to Alexa, including the ability to delete voice recordings of the day by simply asking Alexa, instead of visiting the Amazon site. These changes have probably been made so that smart speakers and voice badistants can continue to proliferate in the world of technology and help boost consumer confidence, which has been shaken by the series of revelations.

The new Amazon policy came into effect Friday, according to Bloomberg, who reported this change for the first time. Apple stated that he suspends his human reviews of Siri recordings around the world while he is performing a review. Google also announced that it would pause its overall human review process, after a Google provider leaked voice recordings to a news agency based in Belgium.

"We take our customers' confidentiality seriously and constantly review our practices and procedures," an Amazon spokesperson said Friday in a statement. "We will also update the information provided to customers to clarify our practices."

Since the publication of articles this year on human reviews of Alexa records, Amazon has repeatedly said that only a small fraction of these records were reviewed by people.

To turn off human review of your Alexa records, go to the Alexa privacy settings on Amazon or the Alexa app. Then click on "Manage the improvement of your Alexa data" and disable the "Help us improve Amazon Services and develop new features" tab.

On this page, Amazon states that "only a very small fraction of voice recordings are manually reviewed" and that the information is used to improve Alexa services and develop new features. The company warns that disabling this setting may degrade Alexa's speech recognition and its new features.