Your Amazon Echo Is Losing The Ability To Process Alexa Commands On-Device

Roger Fingas / Android Authority

Amazon finally announced the highly anticipated generative AI-powered upgrade for Alexa late last month. The new and improved voice assistant, dubbed Alexa Plus, is scheduled to roll out in early access later this month, giving users access to new capabilities, like a more conversational experience, personal memory, smarter music and video controls, visual understanding, and more. However, it’s also dropping support for a key feature.

Amazon recently sent an email to Alexa users (via Reddit), highlighting that it will soon disable the on-device processing feature previously available on select Echo devices. Per the email, the ‘Do Not Send Voice Recordings’ feature, which allowed compatible devices to process Alexa commands locally, will no longer be available starting March 28, 2025.

Amazon is getting rid of this feature in preparation for Alexa’s generative AI upgrade, which will “rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud.” As a result, the company has “decided to no longer support this feature.”

If you use this feature on your Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, or Echo Show 15, Amazon will automatically update your Alexa settings to ‘Don’t save recordings’ after March 28. The company says that with this setting, your voice recordings will be sent to and processed in the cloud but will be deleted after Alexa processes your request. Any previously saved voice recordings will also be deleted once the change goes into effect.

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