Turn on the permission first

EchoGuide works by operating your other apps for you. Android will not let it do that until you allow it by hand, once:

Settings → Accessibility → EchoGuide → turn on.

Nothing else works until this is on. If EchoGuide answers you but nothing happens on screen, this is almost always why.

You will also be asked, when you first open the app, to choose your language, allow the microphone, and decide whether EchoGuide may keep anything. You can change all three later.

Speaking to it

Say the wake word, then say what you want in your own words.

You do not need to learn commands. EchoGuide does not match your speech against a fixed list — it works out what you meant and then does it. Amharic and English both work, and you can switch languages at any time from settings.

Three things worth knowing:

Pause when you are done. About 0.7 seconds of silence tells EchoGuide you have finished. A short pause mid-sentence will not cut you off.
Speak for at least half a second. Anything shorter is treated as a noise and ignored.
Keep it under 15 seconds. That is a hard limit.

EchoGuide is not listening the whole time. It starts recording when it hears the wake word and stops when you stop talking.

What you will hear back

Every outcome is spoken. Silence is treated as a fault, not a result — if EchoGuide ever goes quiet in the middle of something, that is worth reporting.

You should hear a short acknowledgement within about half a second of finishing your sentence. That confirms you were heard. It comes before the work is done, not after.

Then one of these:

What you hear	What it means
It describes the action and does it	Understood. It is working.
It asks you to confirm	The action cannot be undone easily. Say yes or no.
It asks you to say it again	It was not confident enough to act. It will try twice.
It says it cannot do that	The plan was not something EchoGuide is allowed to perform.

When it asks you to confirm

Some actions are hard to take back — sending, deleting, paying. For those, EchoGuide describes what it is about to do and waits.

It will not act until you agree. Declining cancels the whole thing, and nothing is performed.

This is deliberate. EchoGuide can drive any app on your phone, including your bank, so it asks before doing anything it cannot undo.

When it asks you to repeat

If the audio was unclear, EchoGuide asks rather than guessing. It will try up to twice before giving up and telling you so.

This usually means background noise, a very short phrase, or the microphone being covered. Acting on a bad guess is worse than asking again.

What it keeps

By default, nothing. No recordings, no text of what you said.

Your audio is used to work out what you asked for and is then gone. You can opt in to letting EchoGuide keep your command history if you want failures investigated or recognition improved on your own voice — and you can turn that back off whenever you like.

The full detail is in Privacy and data.

If something is not working

It answers, but nothing happens on screen. The accessibility permission is off. See the top of this page.

It never answers at all. The phone is not reaching the internet. EchoGuide needs a connection to understand you.

It keeps asking you to repeat. Move somewhere quieter, or hold the phone closer.

It goes silent mid-command. That is a bug. Every state is supposed to be spoken.