Manual Windows
System requirements
What Neato Echo needs from your Windows PC, and what the on-device speech and language models need on top of that.
Neato Echo is a desktop app for Windows. There's no web version and no browser extension: it runs on your PC so it can hear your microphone and type into whatever app you're using.
The short answer
| Minimum | |
|---|---|
| Windows | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit (x64) |
| Also | A microphone, and an internet connection the first time you download a model |
Everything runs on your own PC by default, so the models are the demanding part. That's covered below.
Running models on your device
Speech-to-text and the local language model are downloaded once and then run entirely on your machine. Two things matter: disk space for the model, and enough speed to keep up with you.
- Disk — the default speech engine, NVIDIA Parakeet (Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3), is about 600 MB. Whisper models range from Tiny (75 MB) to Large (3 GB). The recommended language model for summaries, cleanup and the agent, Qwen 3.5 4B, is about 2.5 GB; smaller Qwen sizes exist for lower-end PCs. Everything lives under a cache folder you can clear later — see where your files live.
- Memory — a language model has to fit in memory while it runs. Qwen 3.5 4B is comfortable on a PC with 8 GB of RAM or more; on a machine with less, pick a smaller Qwen size in Settings → Language Models.
- Speed — a PC with a discrete GPU runs the bigger models comfortably. On older hardware, pick a smaller model. Local models explains the trade-off and which model to start with.
- Graphics acceleration — an Enable GPU toggle exists for Whisper in Settings → Speech-to-Text. NVIDIA cards use CUDA; AMD or Intel graphics use a Vulkan runtime you can install from Settings in one click.
Architecture and downloads
64-bit x64 only. There's no separate ARM build.
Network
With the default local setup, the app only goes online to download models (from huggingface.co and github.com) and to check for updates (github.com). If you connect a calendar, it also talks to Google or Microsoft; if you add a cloud provider key, it talks to that provider. Everything else it runs binds to your own machine by design. It honors system proxies. Work and managed computers has the full list to hand a firewall administrator.
Local transcription works with no internet connection at all, once the model is downloaded.
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.