Google Assistant was officially launched last year with the first-generation Pixel handsets, but has already become one of the most popular voice-based personal digital assistants in the world alongside Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri. In fact, it recently made its way to all the other Android phones out there, as well as iOS. However, not everybody using the feature realizes that the search giant records and stores absolutely every little voice search request from all its users. While we can turn off Google’s creepy habit of recording all our verbal interactions with Assistant and saving them for posterity, doing so will affect our ability to verbally interact with the AI-based system. However, to its credit, Google does offer us the option to get rid of all traces of our interactions with Assistant from our Google Account history. So, in case you’ve ever wanted to delete your Google Assistant voice search history, here’s how can do it:
Delete Google Assistant Voice Search History
First off, you’ll need to decide whether you want to delete just a few pieces of conversations individually or your entire Google Assistant history from the start. Both are fairly straightforward and, irrespective of whether you’re on Android or iOS, the steps are almost identical. So let’s start off by taking a look at what you should do if you only want to delete a specific conversation.
Delete A Specific Question or Conversation
- To do this, you’ll first need to launch Google Assistant. While just the saying the magic words “OK, Google” should do in on Android, you’ll need to manually launch the app on iOS devices. Once you’ve got the app opened on your device, just tap on the little arrow you see on top of the Assistant window, which should let you access your entire history right from the very first time you ever used the feature.
- Just scroll through the list to find the item you want to delete, then tap and hold that item until it’s highlighted. You’ll be presented with a couple of options at this stage, but all you’ll need to do is pick “Delete Group”. That’s it, the particular conversation is deleted from your account history.
Delete Entire Google Assistant Activity from the Start
- While you can delete your entire Google Assistant history in the manner described above, removing one conversation at a time will be an elaborate and laborious process if you’ve been using the service for a while. In that case, the more efficient way to do that will be to login to your Google Account and go over to your Assistant Activity page.
- Once on your Google Assistant Activity page, click on the ‘Hamburger Menu’ (three little dots) in the top right-hand corner.
- Now choose “Delete activity by”, as can be seen in the image below.
- On the next “Delete activity by” page, you’ll find options to delete your history for any given day or any period of time. Since you want to delete your entire Google Assistant history, choose “All Time”.
- Tap on ‘Delete’ and confirm your choice to get rid of your entire Google Assistant voice search history.
SEE ALSO: 15 Cool Google Assistant Tricks You Should Try
Safeguard Your Privacy By Deleting Your Google Assistant history
While carrying out the aforementioned steps will get rid of your entire voice search history, Google says it might not always reflect in all your devices immediately. According to the search giant, you might have to wait for up to a day for the changes to show up across all your devices, but from anecdotal evidence, it doesn’t take anywhere as long in most cases. Either way, now that you know how to safeguard your privacy by deleting your Google voice search history, give it a go and remember to let us know how it went.
Abubakar Mohammed
