How to Delete All Your Google Home Voice Recordings

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod, and Google Home are growing in popularity, mostly as a means to listen to music at this point. But they do a lot more than that, from answering questions to controlling the smart home.

These speakers have microphones that wait for a "wake word," or a phrase that puts the speaker into full-on listening mode. On Google Home devices, which use the Google Assistant, the wake word is either "Hey Google" or "Okay Google," whichever you prefer. (If you want, you can turn off all that active listening, though it defeats the purpose of having a smart speaker.)

In order to learn more about you and serve up the best answers (and ads), Google stores the audio of your questions and instructions to the Google Assistant. Don't be shocked—companies like Google and its ilk aren't in the habit of erasing your personal data if they don't have to.

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

Thankfully, just as you can delete your history with Alexa on the Amazon Echo, so too can you delete the history of all you've said to the Google Assistant, whether via Google Home or even through your smartphone.

Log Into My Activity

The easy way to find the recordings for your Google Assistant account is to visit MyActivity.Google.com. You can also find this by going to Google.com, logging into your Google Account, clicking your picture at the upper right and selecting Google Account > Personal Info & Privacy > Manage Your Google Activity. On the next page, click Go to My Activity.

My Activity on Mobile

The steps are almost the same on a mobile device. In the Google App on iOS, click your avatar and follow this path: Manage your Google Account > Personal info & privacy > My Activity. You'll get the same page you find on the desktop.

Filter on Voice Activity

On the My Activity page, you could scroll and scroll and scroll for days and days and days. Any info Google has on you is all here. For just voice recordings, look below the search box, where it says + Filter by Date & Product. Click here, leave the date set to "All time." Then uncheck All Products and put a check next to Assistant and Voice & Audio.

Play Back Your Voice

You know how everyone hates listening to the sound of their own voices? There's a scientific reason for that; something to do with bones in your ear. I can't fix that for you. But I can tell you that if you filter the Assistant/voice entries in your Google My Activity page, you can hear yourself talking to Google Home or Google Assistant. It makes for some painful listening.

Delete Individual Recordings

Each individual entry on My Activity has its own menu, indicated by the three-dot menu (). Access it to see details, such as which device or app heard the command, or to delete the entry. Sometimes the page lumps a bunch of things you said together, especially if they all happened in close proximity, time-wise. You can click the menu and select delete either way. A warning will pop up: deleted data can't be recovered. Since that's the point, click Delete.

Filter by Date

You may not want to delete all the voice recordings ever—maybe just one or two in particular, the times you know you said something stupid or incriminating after "Hey Google." If you know the date you did it, you can narrow down the search to a specific day or stretch of days. You can't, however, narrow it down to a specific time. So if you talk to your Google Home all day, constantly, you'll have to hunt for it a little more.

Delete All the Voice Recordings

If you filter by just Product (Google Assistant and Voice & Audio), the list shows not just individual entries, but also offers a menu next to each new day in the list. That way, you can delete a whole day of recorded data. But if you want to really hose all those recordings, forever and ever, click the "Delete Activity By" link in the left-hand navigation. Set a time frame or use the "All time" option. Pick a product (you can't combine Assistant and Voice & Audio here). Click Delete when you're ready.

Limit Google's Record Holding

Google now lets you set an auto-delete of your activity on some of its services. It has rolled out for location history and web & app activity; eventually, you'll be able to use the steps below to delete Voice & Audio Activity.

In the mobile Google Assistant app, click your face in the upper right, then go to You > Your data in the Assistant > My Activity. On the Desktop, go to Activity Controls. Scroll down and you'll see cards for various activity types. If you click Web & App Activity, for example, you'll see an option for "Choose how long to keep" the data collected—the options are 3 months, 18 months, or keep until you manually delete it. It isn't an option under Voice & Audio Activity yet, but Google says it's on the way.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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