Amazon wants Alexa to run your life. First, it must know everything about you

When pressed on this point, Prasad emphasized that his team has made it easier for users to periodically auto-delete their data and opt out of human review. Neither option actually keeps the data from being used to train Alexa's myriad machine-learning models, though. In fact, Prasad alluded to ongoing research that would switch Alexa's training process to one where models can quickly be updated anytime there is new user data, more or less guaranteeing that the value from said data will be captured before it's disposed of. In other words, auto-deleting your data will mean only that it won't still be around to train future models once training algorithms have been updated; for current models, your data would be used in roughly the same way.