Guide
Writing in English when it is not your first language.
The work is not hard. Writing about the work, in English, in a Slack thread that moves faster than you can compose — that is the part that costs you an hour a day.
· Written by the people who make Echo
The short version
If you work in English and think in something else, the tax is not vocabulary. It is the ten minutes on a four-line message, the reply you soften three times because you cannot tell how blunt it reads, and the translator tab you keep hidden behind everything. Echo puts both jobs a shortcut away in the app you are already in: translate a message where it sits, or write it your way and have Clean Up make it read like you meant it — still in your voice, not somebody else’s.
The moments that actually cost you time
Not the hard English. The everyday English, twenty times a day.
The Slack reply you rewrite four times
Write it fast, select it, Clean Up. It comes back saying what you meant, with the tone you intended, in seconds rather than minutes.
A long thread you need the point of
Select it and summarise. Reading twenty messages in a second language to find one decision is not a good use of an afternoon.
An email to a client in English
Write it in your language if that is faster, then translate in place — or turn rough notes straight into a properly written email.
A message in a third language
The colleague who writes in Spanish, the supplier who writes in German. Translate it where it sits and answer in the same window.
Documents and specs to read
Select the paragraph that matters instead of running the whole page through a translator and losing the formatting.
Anything public: LinkedIn, issues, docs
Writing your team will read, and strangers will judge. One pass through Clean Up before it goes out.
Why the translator tab is the problem
Most people already have a solution: a browser tab with a translator in it, kept one alt-tab away all day. It works, and it costs something every single time — the switch, the paste, the copy back, and the small awareness that you are doing it in front of colleagues who are not.
Echo is invisible by comparison. The popup opens over the app you are in and closes when it is done. There is no second window, no history for anyone to notice, and nothing on your screen that says a message went through a translator.
Keeping your voice
Being corrected into a stranger is a real risk with this category of tool, and it is worth saying what Echo aims for: the message you would have written if English were effortless — not the message a corporate style guide would have written. Clean Up keeps your structure and your directness, and fixes what is actually wrong.
When the default is not what you want, type the instruction instead: warmer, shorter, more formal, less apologetic. And Echo is not a language course — it will not teach you why a sentence was wrong. It gets the message sent, which on a Tuesday afternoon is the thing you needed.
The three you will use most
Questions
Echo sends your selection to a large language model, so it covers the languages those models handle well — the major world languages and many smaller ones. You can also ask for a particular register by typing your own instruction: “make this polite but not stiff”, “more direct”, “less formal”.
That is the failure everyone worries about, and it is what Clean Up is tuned against: it fixes grammar, spelling and awkward phrasing while keeping the way you write. If a result reads too smooth, ask for it again with your own instruction — “keep it simple”, “shorter sentences” — and it will follow.
Yes. Write the message the way you think it, select it, and translate it in place — or use Write as Email if it is rough notes rather than a finished message. Nothing goes through a translator window that a colleague could see over your shoulder.
It works in any Mac app where you can select text, because it reads the selection through macOS Accessibility rather than integrating app by app. Slack, Teams, Gmail, Outlook, Notion, Mail, LinkedIn in a browser — all the same.
There is nothing to see. The popup opens over the app you are in and closes when it is done; the text that lands is just text in your message box. Nothing is inserted, watermarked or attributed.
Not by us. It goes over HTTPS to Echo’s own backend, which produces the result and keeps neither the text nor a log of it. On your Mac, Echo keeps a local history so you can look back at what you did — never synced or uploaded, deletable at any time, and it can drop the text automatically after a while.
Echo is free to try for 7 days, no card. Download it for macOS.