Patent 10332517 was granted and assigned to Amazon on June, 2019 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Techniques for configuring a speech processing system with a privacy mode that is associated with the identity of a user that activated the privacy mode are described. A user may speak an indication to have the speech processing system activate a privacy mode. When such an indication is detected by the speech processing system, the speech processing system determines an identity of the user, determines a unique system identifier associated with the user, and generates a privacy mode flag. The speech processing system then associates the privacy mode flag with the user's unique system identifier. The privacy mode flag indicates to components of the speech processing system that any data related to processing of the user's utterances should not be sent to long term storage, thus causing various components of the system to delete data once the respective component is finished processing with respect to an utterance of the user.