Manual Dictation
Getting better accuracy
Practical things that improve transcription quality — the engine you use, your microphone, your language setting, and teaching it your vocabulary.
If transcription is close but not right, there are four levers worth pulling, in roughly the order they pay off.
1. Name your language
Auto-detect is the default, and it's the weakest setting for accuracy because the model spends part of its effort deciding what language you're in. If you nearly always dictate in one language, set it explicitly under Settings → Preferences under App, in the Language section.
This is the single cheapest improvement for most people.
2. Teach it your words
Names, jargon, product names and acronyms are what transcription gets wrong most often, and no amount of model tuning fixes a word the model has never seen.
The custom dictionary exists for this — add the terms you use and they'll be recognized. See custom dictionary.
3. Check your microphone
The built-in microphone on a laptop is usually the weakest link, especially in a room with any background noise. A headset — even a cheap one — is a bigger improvement than changing models.
Pick which microphone Neato Echo uses under Settings → Preferences under App. If it isn't picking up at all, see my microphone isn't working.
Speaking at a normal pace helps more than speaking slowly and clearly. These models are trained on natural speech, and over-enunciating is further from what they expect, not closer.
4. Choose a better engine
Transcription runs on one of several local engines, and they aren't equally accurate. Set yours under Settings → Speech-to-Text under AI Models, on the tab for the mode you're changing — Dictation, Note Recording, or Audio Upload.
| Engine | Trade-off |
|---|---|
| Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 (default) | Fast on CPU, good accuracy, multilingual |
| Parakeet Unified EN | English only, strong accuracy |
| Whisper | Widest language coverage; accuracy scales with model size and your hardware |
| Nemotron Speech Streaming EN 0.6B | Fastest, shows text live while you speak, English only |
| Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B | Streaming, multilingual |
If you're running Whisper and accuracy is poor, a larger model is usually the answer — see local models.
What cleanup does and doesn't fix
Dictation cleanup tidies grammar and punctuation, but it can't recover a word that was misheard — it only sees the transcript, not your audio. Persistent wrong words are a transcription problem, not a cleanup one.
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.