Manual Dictation
Translation
Dictate in one language and have the text pasted in another, using a dedicated hotkey.
Translation gives you a second dictation hotkey that does one extra thing: before pasting, it translates. You speak in one language, the text that lands is in another.
Your ordinary dictation hotkey is unaffected — it keeps pasting in the language you spoke.
Turning it on
Two things are needed, and it's easy to do one and not the other.
1. Configure it. Open Settings, choose Language Models under AI Models, then the Translation tab:
- Enable Dictation Translation — the switch. Off by default.
- Spoken language — what you dictate in. Automatic here also copes with dictation that mixes languages.
- Target languages — the languages you translate into. Add up to 5 and mark one as active.
- Translation Prompt — how the model should translate, if you want to steer it.
2. Give it a key. Open Settings, then Hotkeys under App, and set the Translation Hotkey. Without a key there's no way to start a translated dictation.
Switching between languages
You can keep up to five target languages configured and switch which one is live from the Active target language control, without re-entering settings each time. Useful if you write to people in two or three languages regularly.
Where it runs
Translation runs on the local language model (Qwen 3.5 4B by default, from Settings → Language Models), so nothing leaves your PC. If you've set up a key under Cloud Providers in Settings, you can choose that provider on the Translation tab instead — it's a separate model choice from dictation cleanup, so you can run cleanup locally and translation in the cloud, or the reverse.
Translated dictations are cleaned up first (if cleanup is on), then translated.
Where translations show up
Translated entries are marked as such in your History, and you can re-run one through the translation chain from the retry menu if the result wasn't what you wanted.
If translation fails
Your dictation is pasted untranslated, with a notice. It's never dropped — you get the original text and can retry from History.
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.