Should You Train Alexa or Google to Recognize Your Voice? And How?

When digital assistants know who you are, expect more personal results. But is there a privacy risk?

Edward C. Baig,

AARP

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Published September 30, 2025

AARP members and readers are invited to submit pressing technology questions they’d like me to tackle in my Tech Guru column, including issues around devices, security, social media and how all the puzzle pieces fit together. This week, I’m addressing a question surrounding digital assistants and voice recognition.

Amazon Alexa responds to my voice and seems to know who I am. But it doesn’t appear to recognize the voices of my spouse or kids. Can I add them, and how?

If you’ve been using an Amazon Echo smart speaker or certain other smart home products from Amazon or other companies, you’re probably on a first-name basis with the digital assistant Alexa. It wakes up ready to help the moment it hears you call its name.

It’s a similar story when you utter “Hey Google” or “OK Google” with a Google Nest, Google Home speaker, various Android smartphones and other products fronted by the Google Assistant or its rapidly-being-phased-in artificial intelligence replacement Gemini.

Such assistants may greet you by name and deliver hands-free personalized responses to your queries. For instance, they may send out your messages and read others out loud, remind you of calendar appointments, play your favorite music on command and let you shop by voice.

But it also means family members who live with you are not recognized in the same way. While your kids, say, would likely get the same response as you do, that’s not necessarily a plus. Their musical tastes differ from yours; they want to hear or see their own news feeds and other content. And they probably don't need to hear about your next business meeting or doctor’s appointment. Moreover, at the risk of raising a sore subject, do you trust they will not ask the assistant to buy something using your account?

These are all reasons to exploit Amazon and Google features that enable each member of your clan to train Alexa or Google to recognize their own voices.

Amazon’s feature is called Alexa Voice ID, and the idea is that once Alexa recognizes a person, it will address them by their own name and deliver answers, services and experiences that apply specifically to them, not to mention keep stuff separate from others in the household.  

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Google’s rough equivalent is called Voice Match, and it works with up to six people in one home on devices signed into with a Google account.

Training assistants to learn voices is fast and easy

Amazon Voice ID. Amazon explains that when you create a Voice ID, Alexa uses recordings of your voice to create an acoustic model in the cloud.

The simplest way to create an Alexa Voice ID is to say out loud, “Alexa, learn my voice,” nothing more complicated than that.

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Alternatively, follow these steps.

Open the Amazon Alexa app on Android or iOS and tap the More icon, which resembles three horizontal lines of differing lengths.
Tap Settings | Your Profile & Family.
Select the Profile logged into the app, and select Voice ID.
You’ll be prompted to say a few phrases out loud, such as “Alexa, turn off the lights” or “Alexa, add milk to my shopping list.”

That’s pretty much it. However, you have an opportunity, if you haven’t already done so, to fill in your phone number and interests as part of your profile, which each individual family member would do in kind.

Google Voice Match. To set up Google Voice Match, open the Google Home app on your iPhone, iPad or Android phone.

Tap Settings | Google Assistant | Voice Match and tap to place a check mark next to all the devices in your home in which you want your voice recognized.

As with Amazon, you’ll be asked to repeat a few phrases, such as “Hey Google, help me write a thank-you note” or “Hey Google, tell me how a rainbow is formed.”

Privacy, to a degree

Letting assistants recognize your voice has certain privacy implications and shouldn’t give you any false sense of security, even in your own house.

Google notes that “a similar voice or recording might be able to access your personal results or your Assistant.” It adds that on smart displays, some personal results or notifications may appear proactively on the Home screen without you asking, which would let someone else in the house who wanders by view and act on them by tapping the screen.

Managing how long voice recordings are saved

These companies amass and archive a lot of data about you, ostensibly to improve how well their digital assistants work and other services. Of course, it also helps them and partners deliver targeted ads.

It is also worth noting that sometimes human beings hear snippets of your interactions, which may not meet your expectation of privacy, even if they cannot identify you.

Meanwhile, the digital assistants are always listening for their wake words, typically “Alexa” (though you can change it) on Amazon stuff and “Hey Google” on Android and elsewhere. Amazon begins recording your voice when you utter the wake word “Alexa,” and the company retains that data — unless you tell it not to, as follows:

Amazon Alexa: Tap More | Alexa Privacy | Manage Your Alexa Data | Voice Recordings and Typed Requests. Among your choices, tap the Enable deletion by voice switch, which allows you to do that by issuing a command like “Alexa, delete everything I said today.”

Or tap Choose how long to save recordings and typed requests to Alexa and note your options. You can ask it to stop saving records after 3 months, 18 months, or until you decide to delete them. You can also indicate that you don’t want Amazon to save any of the recordings. In making this choice, Amazon also deletes previous recordings.

Google: When you turn on Voice Match with Google, Google automatically saves audio of your interactions with the Assistant, as well as voice interactions through Search and Google Maps. To protect your privacy, Google says it disassociates saved audio from your Google account and recordings to temporarily process and model your voice for recognition purposes, after which it is deleted.

But you can also control this manually. On the web, go to myaccount.google.com and click Data & Privacy | Web & App Activity and check or uncheck the Include voice and audio activity box, depending on your preferences. When off, audio won’t be saved from then on, but previously saved audio is retained. To dispose of old audio, start by looking under the History settings of this Web & App Activity area. You can identify stored audio by icons shaped like a microphone.

If your privacy concerns override the benefits of enabling Voice Match on Google or Voice ID on Alexa, you can disable the features or not use them at all. If you change your mind, you can easily retrain Google and Amazon to recognize your voice and those of family members again.

Bonus tip: Give your kid an age-appropriate Alexa voice ID profile

You can set up Alexa Voice ID profiles for your kids or grandkids. Start in the Alexa app by tapping More | Settings | Amazon Kids | Add a kid. After adding their birth dates and following prompts to set up their profile, the kids can train Alexa to recognize their own voices. Parents or grandparents shouldn’t worry about Junior running amok or hearing stuff they shouldn’t. Alexa will only deliver age-appropriate, kid-friendly responses that meet your approval.

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Edward C. Baig covers technology and other consumer topics. He previously worked for USA Today, BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report and Fortune, and is author of Macs for Dummies and coauthor of iPhone for Dummies and iPad for Dummies. Follow him on LinkedIn; Threads; and X, formerly known as Twitter.