One question we see come up fairly often among Alexa user groups is whether it's possible to download the clips you sent to your own devices, which are accessible from the companion apps. It is! And it's actually pretty easy to do. In this tutorial, we'll walk you through the steps required.
Retrieving your audio clips doesn't require any special utilities or skillset. All you need is a modern browser. We're going to use Google Chrome, but you'd be able to complete these same steps in pretty much any current desktop browser. Everything we do will be through Amazon's official Alexa web console at alexa.amazon.com. It's surprising how many folks we talk to that have no idea this site exists - the Android and iOS companion apps seem to have a much stronger foothold among users.
Step 1: Find your request
Open up the site mentioned (alexa.amazon.com), browse to the "home" section if you're on a different part of the site, and scroll through the list of recent requests (and flash briefings, if applicable) until you find the audio you'd like to save.
One thing worth noting here - some first party features and third party skills do not provide output cards for some or all of their user interactions. In cases where a card was not generated, we haven't yet found a way to retrieve the audio clips.
One thing worth noting here - some first party features and third party skills do not provide output cards for some or all of their user interactions. In cases where a card was not generated, we haven't yet found a way to retrieve the audio clips.
Step 2: Expand the voice feedback accordion
Clicking the "more" link (highlighted in red in the image above) for your request will bring up the "voice feedback" pane, which allows you to do a few things, as shown in the image below. Most importantly, it allows us to click a link to replay the audio Alexa stored for our request.
Step 3: Open Chrome's developer tools
Now that we know how to trigger the audio, we need a way to figure out what the url for that audio file is. For this, we'll use Chrome's built-in developer tools. It's super easy to get into this mode. There are two shortcuts you can use (f12 or Ctrl + Shift + I), or you can do it via mouse by clicking the menu button in the top right, and then More Tools -> Developer tools. You should see a pane pop up from the bottom of your screen, looking something like the image below.
Step 4: Go to the network tab
You'll most likely end up on the "Elements" tab of the developer tools when you first launch it. What we want is the "Network" tab, highlighted above. Click it, and you'll most likely go to a tab with an empty table that says "Recording network activity", as below.
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Step 5: Click the link
Click the "play" button for your request. You should hear your voice play from the window, and more importantly for our uses you should see a new row pop up in the network tab, looking something like the one shown below.
Step 6: Copy link into new tab
The row you generated is the request that the alexa site made behind the scenes to retrieve your audio file from the server. You can copy this url and use it for yourself! On the text in the leftmost column, right click. This should bring up a small menu, and you can choose "open in new tab", which will open up a new tab like the one below, where you can replay that file as many times as you'd like.
Alternately, you can choose to copy the link by doing a right click, and then choosing copy -> copy link address. Remember, though, that when you paste the url, it must be in a browser session where you've already logged in to alexa.amazon.com. The audio files are secured by your session data, and so using an incognito tab, or trying to hit the url after a long period of inactivity, will prompt you for a login screen.
Alternately, you can choose to copy the link by doing a right click, and then choosing copy -> copy link address. Remember, though, that when you paste the url, it must be in a browser session where you've already logged in to alexa.amazon.com. The audio files are secured by your session data, and so using an incognito tab, or trying to hit the url after a long period of inactivity, will prompt you for a login screen.
Step 7: Download!
The rightmost button on your new audio clip player is the download button. You can use it to save the file to disc under whatever name you want. The files will be in .wav format, which you should be able to play with almost any audio player
We wrote this post because of requests from folks on Reddit who had interesting use cases we hadn't considered. If this is useful to you in some way, we'd love to hear from you about what problem you were trying to solve. Drop us a comment, or as always, feel free to hit us up directly.
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