Manual Dictation
Dictation cleanup
Neato Echo can tidy your dictation before pasting it — removing filler words, fixing grammar and punctuation. It's off by default; here's what it changes and how to switch it on.
By default, what gets pasted is the transcript as the speech-to-text model produced it. Neato Echo can optionally run your dictation through a language model that, in the app's words, will "remove filler words, fix grammar, and polish punctuation."
This is off by default. With it on, dictation reads like writing rather than like speech — and, occasionally, the text isn't quite what you said.
What it changes
Cleanup is meant to be conservative. It takes out the ums and you knows, adds punctuation you didn't speak, fixes obvious grammatical slips, and leaves your wording alone otherwise.
It does not rewrite your text into a different tone, answer questions, or follow instructions you dictate. If that's happening, you're hitting the voice agent rather than cleanup — see the four things your voice can start.
Turning it on or off
Open Settings, choose Language Models under AI Models, then the Dictation Cleanup tab. The switch is Enable text cleanup.
With it off you get the raw transcript — filler words, no punctuation beyond what the model inferred, and none of the tidying. Some people prefer this for note-taking, where fidelity matters more than polish.
Where it runs
Cleanup runs on the local language model — Qwen 3.5 4B by default, downloaded under Settings → Language Models — so the text never leaves your PC. Smaller Qwen sizes are available for lower-end PCs. Local cleanup adds a little time before the paste, depending on your hardware.
If you've set up a key under Cloud Providers in Settings (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq and others), you can run cleanup on that provider instead. That sends the transcript to the provider under its terms, so keep it local if you dictate anything sensitive.
When cleanup fails
If the cleanup step can't run, your dictation is pasted anyway, uncleaned, with a note saying "Your dictation was pasted without AI cleanup." You don't lose the text — that's deliberate.
Recurring failures usually mean the model can't be reached: a local model that hasn't finished downloading, or, with a cloud provider, an expired API key or no network.
Related
Still need help?
Write to [email protected] with your Windows version, your Neato Echo version (Settings → System), and what you were doing. A person reads every message.