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Key takeaways

• Google may have your voice saved without your knowledge.
• The recordings come from Assistant, Maps, and Search.
• It's probably a good idea to delete these recordings.

Google might have recordings of your voice that you don't know about. Fortunately, there's something you can do about it.

As someone who has an email address that's almost 30 years old (my Hotmail I signed up for in 1998) and account after account that's had credentials leaked, I figure I've had a digital footprint long enough that I've long since given up any hope of true online privacy.

I scroll right past those "Your personal info found on Google Search" emails I used to follow through on (the takedown process is surprisingly effective, by the way), and I wasn't even fazed when I read about a lawsuit that alleged Google might have recorded users' voices without their knowledge.

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That article prompted me to see if Google had any audio recordings of me. As someone who generally shrugs at online privacy concerns, what I found made me pause.

I found nearly 7,000 entries for Assistant alone going all the way back to December 2017. That itself still didn't bother me. All right, maybe someone accesses that history and sees the hundreds of timers I set with Assistant over the past eight years or the pile of random queries.

What bothered me is that some of my voice interactions were stored, along with a link to play those recordings back. Seeing all of my interactions didn't seem that bad, but being able to play back recording after recording was unsettling.

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I couldn't pinpoint why some interactions were recorded and some weren't. I found recordings from my phone, from Android audio, and even from my TV that has Google TV as its OS. Every recording was a time I genuinely intended to use Assistant. I did see accidental interactions listed, but none of them actually recorded audio (that's what the lawsuit was about). Still, I didn't love seeing stacks of recorded audio I didn't know existed.

What does Google do with these recordings?

Google explains that it saves voice recordings for Google Search, Assistant, and Maps to "develop and improve its audio recognition technologies," and adds that the setting is off unless you choose to turn it on. I'm sure that's true, but I honestly don't remember enabling that option.

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I found an old reference that says Google deletes audio recordings after 18 months, but I didn't see anything official about how long these recordings are stored. I've reached out to Google for clarification.

How to find your voice recordings

Here's how to see if Google has your voice recordings stored.

Head to Google's Web & App Activity page at https://myactivity.google.com. Scroll down until you see "Filter by date & product." When you open that page, you'll see a list of all Google products, with "Assistant" near the top.

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Once you're on that page, you'll see a breakdown of every single time you interacted with Assistant, either through voice or text. My history only went to October 2025, which is about the time Google officially pulled the plug on Assistant and forced users to Gemini.

If you used Assistant with any frequency, you'll probably see a lot of entries. Search for ones starting with "Said," which indicate a verbal interaction. If you see a small microphone icon under the listing, it means there's an audio recording. Click "details," and you'll see a screen where you can click "view recording" to actually listen to what Google has saved.

How to opt-out of voice recordings and delete yours

If you decide you don't want Google to save voice recordings, you can simply uncheck "Include voice and audio activity" on the Google My Activity page. When you do, you'll see a message that while Google will still process your audio when you speak to its services, it will no longer save audio recordings in your Google Account on Google servers.

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You can delete your already saved history by filtering your activity history to Assistant and then clicking delete. Of course, you can also skip applying any filters and delete all of your activity if you'd like.

Should you delete these recordings?

Given that Google says the recordings are used to improve its products (it does admit that human teams will sometimes listen to it, by the way), I can't think of any useful reason to keep them around. Simple privacy concerns aside, there's also the potential for those recordings to be misused should someone ever compromise your account.

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Once you delete your recordings, Google acknowledges, "The activity you selected is being permanently deleted from your account and no longer tied to you." At least on my end, when I deleted my voice recordings, they were gone immediately.

Even if you're not especially privacy-minded, it's probably a good idea to see what info Google has on you and make sure any recordings don't stick around.

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