When Amazon unveiled its Fire TV last week, it claimed to have addressed a major annoyance when it comes to using streaming media services: the search experience.
Rather than having to type each individual letter when trying to find a movie or TV show, you can simply recite the title directly into Fire TV's remote.
But there are two details Amazon left out of its presentation.
Whenever you perform a voice search using Fire TV, Amazon saves a recording of your voice.
It does this to learn more about how you speak and to improve the overall quality of search results, according to Amazon's website. You can easily delete these recordings, as CNET discovered, by logging in to Amazon's website, heading over to your Account Settings and scrolling down to the Digital Content section.
From here, click on "Manage Your Content and Devices" and then navigate to the "Manage Your Devices" option on the left side of the screen.
After you click on your registered Fire TV, you'll be presented with the option to manage your voice recordings. By manage, Amazon actually means delete. You don't get to hear what has been recorded or view a list of recordings. Here's the message you'll receive
There's also one other detail Amazon left out of its presentation last week. Fire TV's voice search only pulls up results from Amazon's Instant Video library and Vevo. This means you can't use your voice to search for content from Netflix, Showtime or any other streaming video apps you may use with Fire TV.
On it's promotional website for the Fire TV under the Voice Search section, Amazon doesn't mention that this feature only works with its own content. This could be a bit confusing or misleading for some consumers, considering Fire TV's product page says you can "instantly search TV shows, movies, actors, directors and genres just using your voice."
That's not to say Amazon's voice-enabled search doesn't work well. In fact, we found it to be extremely responsive and accurate when reviewing the device. It's just a bit disappointing that you can't search across all of your apps like you can with the Roku's standard search.
SEE ALSO: REVIEW: Amazon's Fire TV Is A Leap Forward For Set-Top Boxes, But With Its Own Shortcomings