Antivirus or firewall blocks Neato Echo

Security software flags Neato Echo, or quietly removes parts of it after installation. There are several separate versions of this and they look different, so it's worth identifying which one you have.

1. SmartScreen says "Windows protected your PC"

The Neato Echo installer isn't code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen shows a blue Windows protected your PC screen the first time you run it. It's a reputation signal, not a detection — Windows says the same about any new, unsigned application. Norton, McAfee and similar products can show their own version of the same warning.

What to do: download only from echo.neatoventures.com or the GitHub releases page. Then, on the SmartScreen screen, click More info, and then Run anyway. Other security suites have an equivalent "keep" or "run anyway" option.

If your security software reports a specific detection name rather than a generic warning, please send it to us — that's what a false-positive report to the vendor needs.

2. Bundled components are quarantined

This is the one that produces confusing symptoms, because the app installs fine and then fails at one specific task. Neato Echo ships helper programs for the work it does locally, and Windows Defender or another scanner sometimes removes them silently afterwards:

What to do:

1. 1

   Restore anything that was quarantined

   In Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Protection history, find the entry for the file, open it, and choose Actions → Restore (or Allow on device).

2. 2

   Add an exclusion so it doesn't happen again

   Windows Security → Virus & threat protection → Manage settings → Exclusions → Add or remove exclusions. Add the Neato Echo install folder (where the bundled servers and helpers live), and add %USERPROFILE%\.cache\neato-echo, where the downloaded models are kept.

3. 3

   Reinstall if a file is still missing

   Run the newest Neato-Echo-Setup-<version>.exe over your existing install and the removed files come back. Your settings and notes stay where they are.

Reinstalling without adding the exclusion first usually just repeats the cycle.

3. A firewall prompt for the local server

The first time local Parakeet transcription runs, Windows may ask whether to allow sherpa-onnx-ws-win32-x64 on public and private networks. You may see the same kind of prompt for the local language model server, llama-server.

Either answer is safe. These servers only serve Neato Echo itself over 127.0.0.1, and Windows never filters loopback traffic — so everything works even if you click Cancel. The prompt appears because the server has no loopback-only bind option, so Windows sees it listening on all interfaces.

4. The firewall blocks downloads or a cloud provider

With the default local setup Neato Echo only needs the network for two things: downloading models (from huggingface.co and GitHub) and checking for updates (from github.com). If you've added a key under Cloud Providers, requests to that provider need to get out too.

If those fail with connection errors rather than a security warning, the firewall is blocking outbound traffic rather than the application itself. Allow Neato Echo through Windows Firewall, and on a managed network ask your IT team to allow those hosts — see For your IT team.

FAQ

Related

• Neato Echo won't open
• Local transcription isn't working
• Updates and reinstalling