Smart home & voice guides

Why voice assistants are different

Voice assistants are the one category where the account belongs to the household rather than to a child. Anyone within earshot can use the speaker, so the useful controls are about what it will do rather than who is asking: voice purchasing, intercom and drop-in features, explicit content, and what is kept from what it hears.

Voice recognition helps, and it is worth setting up. Treat it as a convenience feature rather than a lock.

A speaker in a bedroom is a different device from the same speaker in a kitchen. It can be spoken to by anyone in the household and, on most platforms, spoken through by anyone in the household too, which makes who belongs to the home account a more useful thing to review than any individual toggle. It also listens overnight unless something stops it, so a do-not-disturb schedule earns its place here more than it does anywhere else on this site.

Assume every one of these devices keeps recordings until told otherwise, and check the deletion and review settings on the account rather than the device. That is the setting parents most often assume is already handled, and the one that turns a speaker into a record of a child’s home life.