Tell Alexa+ to remember your kid's shoe size or where you hide the spare house key, and it saves that note to your account under a feature called Remember This. That's just the visible layer. Underneath it sits a larger personalization system that also draws on your purchase history, your listening habits, and any documents or photos you choose to share with it, and none of it is hidden: Amazon documents all of it in its own help pages and product announcements. What actually matters if you use an Echo device is simpler than the marketing language: what gets stored, who else can see it, and how to remove it if you change your mind.
What Alexa+ actually remembers
Amazon describes Alexa+ as learning about you in two different ways at once. According to Amazon's own account of the rebuild, Alexa+ "does this, both implicitly and explicitly, by matching common patterns, occasionally asking to confirm your preferences, and recalling specific facts you ask Alexa to remember." In plain terms, some of what Alexa+ knows comes from things you told it directly, and some comes from patterns it noticed on its own.
- Explicit notes through Remember This: facts you ask Alexa to store on request, such as a family member's birthday, a shoe size, where you keep spare house keys, or the ingredients in a recipe you dictate out loud.
- Implicit shopping and media history: what you've bought on Amazon, what you've listened to, what you've watched, your shipping address, and how you like to pay, all folded in to make future answers more relevant without you asking for that.
- Shared documents, emails, and photos: you can forward school emails, upload HOA guidelines, or share a recipe with Alexa+ through the app, a desktop browser, or email, and later ask it plain-language questions about what's inside them.
- Household personalization through voice and visual ID: on compatible Echo Show devices, Alexa+ can tell household members apart and route reminders to the right person, for example telling your partner a load of laundry needs to be swapped when they get home while you separately get a ping about a 7 p.m. dinner reservation.
Amazon's own product demonstrations make the shared-document piece concrete. In a walkthrough covered by TechCrunch, an Alexa director asked the assistant to check a previously uploaded family recipe: "From grandma's zucchini bread recipe, how much oil did it need?" Alexa+ pulled the figure straight out of the document. The same demonstration covered less charming, more everyday uses too, like uploading Homeowners Association rules so residents can ask what they're actually allowed to do with their own yard, or forwarding a run of school emails so Alexa+ can extract the important dates and update a calendar without anyone re-typing them.
Remember This vs. your everyday Alexa history
Two systems matter here, and Amazon manages them differently. Remember This is a curated list of notes you built on purpose, one at a time, by telling Alexa to remember something. Your everyday Alexa history is a running log of every request the assistant processed, whether it was a memory-worthy fact or just "what's the weather." Amazon's Alexa Privacy dashboard covers both, along with any files you've shared. Amazon describes it as the place where customers can "easily review their interactions, the attachments they share, notes in Remember This, voice recordings," all in one screen. The two categories look similar in that dashboard, but they follow different rules for how long they stick around and how you clear them. Someone who diligently deletes their voice history every week can still have a list of Remember This notes going back years, because clearing one system does not touch the other.
How to view, edit, and delete what Alexa remembers
Managing Remember This notes
Amazon's own instructions are specific: open the Alexa app, select More, select Alexa Privacy, then select Review Info in Remember This. From that screen you can swipe an individual note to archive it, or select Archive All to clear every note at once. That is the extent of what Amazon documents publicly: archiving one note or archiving everything, not a separate permanent-delete button with different wording. Notes are also shared property inside an account. Amazon's help page states that notes are "available to anyone using a supported Alexa-enabled device logged into the account," so a note one person adds is visible to everyone else signed into that household's Alexa account, not private to the person who created it.
No voice shortcut removes a single Remember This note. You can tell Alexa to remember something new, but not to forget one specific entry by voice. Clearing a note means opening the Alexa app and doing it by hand, unlike voice recordings, which you can delete by saying commands such as "Alexa, delete what I just said."
Managing voice recordings and interaction history
Voice recordings and their transcripts are handled through the same Alexa Privacy settings, with their own retention choices. Amazon's privacy documentation lists the options plainly: save recordings until you delete them yourself, automatically delete them after 18 months, automatically delete them after 3 months, or don't save recordings at all. Choose not to save recordings, and the text transcript of each request still sticks around for 30 days after your last interaction. Amazon also uses a small slice of recordings for what it calls supervised machine learning, human review of "an extremely small sample" of interactions to improve how Alexa recognizes speech and responds across accents and dialects. That review can be turned off separately from the app's privacy settings, and it runs independently of whatever retention window you've chosen. Every one of these controls is also reachable from a browser at amazon.com/alexaprivacysettings, which is worth bookmarking if you'd rather manage this from a computer than dig through phone menus.
The catch: Alexa+ needs the cloud, all the time
This is the part that changes the calculus for anyone weighing an always-on microphone against a feature that also remembers what you say to it. Until March 2025, a handful of Echo models, the fourth-generation Echo Dot, Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15, offered a setting called Do Not Send Voice Recordings, which processed voice requests locally on the device instead of streaming audio to Amazon's servers. Amazon retired that setting on March 28, 2025, telling affected users that "as we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon's secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature." Reporting at the time noted that fewer than 0.03% of customers had ever turned the option on, but its removal still means the same thing for everyone on those devices going forward: every voice request now reaches Amazon's cloud for processing. The remaining choice is only whether that audio is retained afterward or discarded, not whether it left the device in the first place.
There's a second, quieter change worth knowing about. Amazon's privacy documentation notes that joining Alexa+ automatically turns on Follow-up Mode for compatible Echo devices, which keeps the microphone actively listening for a follow-up question for a few seconds after each exchange, without needing a fresh "Alexa" wake word. Combined with mandatory cloud processing, this is the practical shape of the trade-off: a device that listens locally for its name, streams audio to the cloud once triggered, stays receptive slightly longer after each exchange, and now also keeps a running set of notes about you inside the same account.
Is Remember This on by default?
The honest answer depends on which layer of memory you mean. Remember This itself doesn't store anything until you explicitly ask Alexa to remember it, so in that narrow sense nothing new gets captured without a prompt from you. The broader personalization layer is different. It draws on purchase history, streaming activity, and shipping details your Amazon account already holds, and Amazon does not document a single toggle that turns that layer off entirely; it's presented as a baseline part of how the service works rather than an opt-in feature you switch on. If you share a household account, remember that Remember This notes aren't private within it. Voice and visual ID can help Alexa+ tell people apart when responding, but the notes themselves remain visible to anyone signed into the account on a supported device.
Availability follows Amazon Prime. Alexa+ costs $19.99 a month on its own, and it's included at no extra cost for Prime members, across Alexa-enabled devices, Alexa.com, and the Alexa app. Coverage has been U.S.-first, with Amazon expanding it to Canada during 2025 and 2026. Device support is broad but not universal: most second-generation-and-later Echo speakers and Echo Show units work with Alexa+, with early access prioritized on Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21. First-generation Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Plus, Echo Show, and Echo Spot models are left on standard Alexa, and third-party "Alexa Built-in" devices aren't supported at all.
The distinction worth sitting with is architectural, not just a difference in marketing copy. Alexa+ is built around a microphone that's ready to listen in a room and a cloud pipeline its generative AI features require to function, so its memory grows out of ambient conversation as much as anything you deliberately hand it. That difference shows up in what triggers each system to start remembering anything at all: a spoken exchange a microphone happened to pick up, versus a file, note, or recording a person chose to add themselves. MemX takes the second, narrower shape: you choose what goes in, whether that's a photo, a document, a voice note, or a WhatsApp message, and it becomes searchable later on your own terms. MemX describes its own approach as private by architecture, built on customer-managed encryption keys, per-user data isolation, and encryption at rest, rather than an assistant that's reachable by saying a name out loud in the room. Neither model is automatically the safer choice for every situation. The useful habit, for any device or app that remembers things about you, is checking exactly what it stores and exactly how you get it back out.
Frequently asked questions
01What is Remember This with Alexa+?
It's Amazon's built-in feature for saving specific facts on request, things like birthdays, shoe sizes, or where you keep spare keys. You create an entry by telling Alexa to remember something, then ask about it later. Entries live in the Alexa app under Alexa Privacy, where you can review and archive them.
02Does Alexa+ listen to everything I say?
Echo devices listen locally for the wake word and only send audio to Amazon's cloud once triggered. Since March 2025, Amazon removed the option to process that triggered audio on-device only, so with Alexa+, every triggered recording is sent to Amazon's servers for processing; you still choose whether the recording is saved afterward or automatically deleted.
03How do I see or delete what Alexa remembers about me?
Open the Alexa app, go to More, then Alexa Privacy, then Review Info in Remember This to see saved notes; swipe one away or tap Archive All to clear them. Voice recordings and transcripts are managed separately in the same Alexa Privacy section, with retention set to 3 months, 18 months, or off.
04Is Alexa+'s memory turned on by default?
Remember This only stores something after you explicitly ask Alexa to remember it, so nothing is saved from that specific feature without a prompt from you. Broader personalization, drawn from your existing purchase and listening history, runs as a baseline part of the service itself, and Amazon doesn't document a single switch that turns that layer off entirely.
05Can other people in my household see what Alexa remembers?
Yes, by default. Amazon's help documentation states that notes saved through Remember This are available to anyone signed into the same account on a supported device, not just whoever created them. Voice and visual ID help Alexa tell household members apart when responding, but the shared notes themselves stay visible account-wide.
