The keyboard changes, not the habit
Google voice typing is the microphone inside Gboard. Tap it, talk, and words appear. It is capable, it is already on the phone, and for most people it is the only dictation they have ever tried.
LocalType replaces the keyboard rather than the habit. The microphone key is still there and still works the same way, but the recognition happens on your own device, and the app has no account attached to it.
No affiliation with Google is claimed or implied; LocalType is a separate product.
What Gboard already does
A lot of writing on this subject claims Google dictation is always a trip to a server. Not true, and the actual behaviour is more mixed.
Gboard can dictate over the network, and it can also use downloadable language packs so that dictation keeps working with no connection at all. Which handsets get the faster on-device version, and for which languages, varies by device.
So the interesting question is not whether local dictation is possible on Android. It plainly is. The question is whether it is guaranteed.
A mode you have to trust, or the only mode there is
With Gboard, local recognition is a state your phone might be in. It depends on the model you bought, the language you speak, whether the right pack is installed, and what the keyboard decides to do in the moment. When conditions change, behaviour can change with them.
LocalType has no second path. There is no cloud transcription in the app, so there is no setting to verify before you say something you would rather keep between you and the person you are writing to, and nothing that can quietly switch back. The speech model is a file on your phone, and it is the only thing that ever hears you.
The offline behaviour is a consequence of that, not a feature bolted on beside it. Once a model is installed, no part of dictation asks for the network. The train tunnel, the flight, the trip abroad on an expensive data plan, the basement, the patchy corner of the office: none of them are conditions the app has to handle. It requests internet access for exactly one purpose, fetching the model you choose.
Counting the cost before the benefits
Replacing the keyboard on a phone is not a small change, and what it costs is concrete.
Gboard has had years of refinement and it is already there, configured, with your habits baked into it. A keyboard you install today starts from nothing. Its dictionary has not met your friends' names, your employer, the abbreviations you use twice a day, or the way you consistently mistype one particular word. LocalType lets you add those by hand, and doing so improves dictation as well as typing, since the same words are handed to the speech model as context. But it is you doing the adding, at least at first.
There is a storage bill too. Built-in dictation appears to cost nothing because the heavy part sits on someone else's hardware. Move it onto the phone and it becomes visible: somewhere between 60 and 539 MB, depending on which model you run. On a phone that is already close to full, that stops being a footnote and becomes a real consideration.
Android also puts two steps in front of a new keyboard rather than one. Installing it is not enough. You enable it in the language and input settings, which shows a warning that appears for every keyboard including the one your phone shipped with, and then you pick it from the selector that comes up while a text field is open. Your old keyboard stays enabled the whole time, so going back mid-sentence is one tap.
And moving to a new handset means setting it up again. Because LocalType keeps its data out of Android's cloud backup, nothing is quietly copied across for you: you install the app and fetch a model. Keeping your data out of a place it could be copied from has this direct consequence, and it cuts both ways.
Nothing is tied to an identity
Gboard belongs to an account-shaped world. Signing in is how the surrounding features work. In LocalType there is nowhere to sign in: no registration step, no profile, and nothing linking the keyboard to a person.
Removing the sign-in is not the whole story, though. What fills that space matters just as much. No advertising is carried anywhere in LocalType, so nothing you dictate feeds a profile used to sell you something later. There is no behavioural tracking inside the app either, so nothing is recording what you do with it. The speech model sits in storage that only the app can read, out of reach of other apps and of any backup process. No archive of your recordings exists at any point, because the audio is turned into text and that is the end of it.
In password fields the microphone also refuses to work, which removes the one category of accidental dictation that genuinely hurts.
And the vocabulary you build up, surnames, place names, the jargon of your job, stays on the phone. That list improves typing suggestions and gets handed to the speech model as context so those words come out right when you say them, and it is never uploaded anywhere, because there is no service on the other end to upload it to.
You pick the trade-off, not the manufacturer
Built-in dictation gives you whatever the vendor decided is right for your handset. LocalType hands that decision over.
Three speech models ship with the app. Compact takes 60 MB and answers quickest, which is what an older or memory-starved phone actually needs. Standard takes 190 MB, and is what the app recommends unless you overrule it. Large takes 539 MB and copes best with accents, fast talkers and background noise, in exchange for patience: measured on a phone with 4 GB of memory, Standard turned 6.9 seconds of speech into text in 4.1 seconds, while Large takes about twice as long as you spent speaking.
Swapping between them replaces the file; it does not add to it, so experimenting does not slowly fill up your phone.
Eighteen languages, no packs to manage
Language packs are administration. You install them, you keep track of which ones are on the device, and you notice when one is missing at the wrong moment.
One multilingual model covers all eighteen languages, and LocalType works out which of them you are speaking from the recording itself, not from a menu you set. Switch language between two messages and it comes along. Pin it to a specific language instead and the layout, the dictionary and the dictation language all move together.
The caveat: quality is not even across all eighteen. Speech models see much more material for some languages than others, and the widely spoken ones benefit.
The keyboard you use on the quiet days
Dictation is a feature of a keyboard, not a replacement for one. LocalType has to survive being used all day by someone who never taps the microphone: autocorrect and next-word suggestions from a dictionary matched to the language, the standard layouts including QWERTZ and AZERTY where those are what people expect, your own names and jargon added by hand, and a complete emoji set with recent picks first.
None of that reaches for the network either. It works on phones and tablets running Android 8.0 and newer, in every app that opens a keyboard.
If none of this troubles you, stay
Gboard is free, already installed, and genuinely good at this. If none of the above troubles you, there is no reason to change anything.
Readers it does trouble are the ones LocalType was built for. No account, no packs to audit, no mode to confirm, and no second path for your voice to take.