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Manual Windows

Work and managed computers

Installing where IT has locked things down, what the app connects to, and the settings that make Neato Echo fit a restrictive policy.

Plenty of people install Neato Echo on a work machine. This is what to do when that machine has opinions.

If you can't run an installer

Neato Echo installs per user, into your own profile, and nothing it installs requires administrator rights to run. Everything it writes stays in your user account — see where your files live. If your policy blocks even per-user installers, ask IT to approve Neato-Echo-Setup-<version>.exe from the releases page.

If the network is filtered

With the default local setup, Neato Echo makes a small number of outbound HTTPS connections on port 443, and everything else it runs binds to your own machine by design. It honors system proxies.

This is the list to hand a firewall administrator, by hostname:

HostWhen
github.com (and its release CDN)Checking for and downloading app updates; downloading some model binaries
huggingface.coDownloading speech and language models
Google (accounts.google.com, www.googleapis.com)Only if you connect a Google Calendar
Microsoft (login.microsoftonline.com, graph.microsoft.com)Only if you connect a Microsoft calendar
Your cloud provider's APIOnly if you add a key under Settings → Cloud Providers

Local transcription needs the internet exactly once — to download the model. After that it works offline entirely.

If security software blocks it

The installer isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen and some antivirus products flag it before it builds reputation. Antivirus blocks Neato Echo covers what to check and what to send us.

If your policy says nothing may leave the device

That's the default configuration, not a special one. Leave speech-to-text on a local engine and the language model local, don't add a cloud provider key, and no audio or text reaches anyone's servers — including ours. Neato Ventures runs no server side for the app at all.

Two settings worth pairing with it:

  • Data Retention off, if nothing should be written to disk either.
  • Don't connect a calendar, if reading your meeting titles from Google or Microsoft is also out of scope.

Where your data goes has the full picture.

What to send your security team

One page: for your IT team. It says what the app is, what it contacts, where it writes, and where the source code is.

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.