Microsoft's speech services do the listening
Microsoft SwiftKey is a free Android keyboard with strong prediction and years of refinement behind it. No account is required for ordinary use.
Its own voice typing runs through Microsoft's speech services, so your audio is processed remotely, on their hardware. Microsoft's own support material points people who want offline dictation towards the platform's voice input instead.
LocalType answers that differently. It is an Android keyboard where the speech model sits on the handset and does the recognition there, so dictation does not depend on a connection and the audio is not transmitted.
The two are unrelated. LocalType is a separate product and is not affiliated with Microsoft.
Prediction, polish, and a language list ours cannot match
SwiftKey's prediction is genuinely good and has been for a long time. It covers far more languages for typing than eighteen, handles multilingual typing without much fuss, and has the polish that comes from being refined against more handsets than a small product will ever see. It is free.
If none of what follows bothers you, there is no reason to change keyboards, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
Sentences that are not like the others
Most of what you dictate is unremarkable and you would not mind reading it aloud in a lift. Running that through a remote service is a normal architecture, it is what allows very large models, and nothing about it should worry anybody.
Then there are the others. Something about a colleague's health. A client's terms. A password hint you would rather say than type. Work material covered by an agreement somebody signed on your behalf, in a language that did not anticipate you dictating it into a keyboard.
For those, the answer to "is the audio transmitted" depends on which keyboard is open at the time, and that dependency is what the choice comes down to.
Nothing leaves the phone, and nothing signs you in
LocalType has no remote path for speech at all. The model is a file on your phone, kept in storage no other app can open, and it is the only thing that ever hears you.
There is nothing to intercept, no processor to name in a contract, and nothing that behaves one way for a sensitive sentence and another way for a routine one. Once the model has been downloaded, dictation carries on in airplane mode, tunnels, basements and abroad with the data switched off, because the app asks for internet access for exactly one purpose and reaches outward that once only.
No account exists anywhere in the product, so nothing ties the keyboard to a person and there is no sync to think about. No archive of your recordings is kept at any point, since the audio becomes text in the field you were typing in and that is the end of its life. Advertising is absent from the product, no behavioural tracking runs inside it, and over a password field no microphone key appears.
Proving it yourself with the data switched off
None of that has to be taken on trust, and a paragraph of reassurance is worth very little on its own.
Turn off mobile data and Wi-Fi. Dictate a paragraph. If the audio needed to reach anything at all, it could not, and you would be looking at an empty text field instead of your sentence.
It is the same test to run against any dictation app, including the one you are using now, and it takes less time than reading the privacy policy that was supposed to answer the question.
What you give up by switching
Switching keyboards is not free.
Prediction quality and familiarity. SwiftKey has learned your habits over years. Any keyboard you install starts from nothing, and the first fortnight feels worse regardless of which one you pick.
Language coverage for typing. SwiftKey supports far more languages than LocalType's eighteen, and if you type in something outside that list this is not a swap you can make.
Sync. If you value your learned words following you to a new phone, LocalType deliberately does not do that. Its data is kept out of Android's cloud backup, so a new handset starts empty. Your vocabulary is stored nowhere but on the device itself, and an empty new phone is what that costs.
Price. SwiftKey is free. LocalType is not, after a trial.
Eighteen languages and three model sizes
Those eighteen come out of one multilingual model, worked out from the recording itself with no menu to touch, so moving between them needs nothing at all from you. Fix it to a single language and the layout, the dictionary and the dictation language all follow that choice.
The three sizes, at 60, 190 and 539 MB, put the speed and accuracy decision in your hands rather than the vendor's. On the 4 GB test handset the middle option wrote out 6.9 seconds of speech in 4.1 seconds, while the largest takes roughly twice as long as you spent speaking. The phone keeps one at a time, so changing your mind swaps the file rather than stacking a second one beside it.
Underneath the microphone it is an ordinary keyboard: corrections as you type, the next word suggested, a dictionary matched to the language you set, the standard layouts including QWERTZ and AZERTY, a full emoji set, and your own names and jargon added by hand. Those additions stay on the handset and are handed to the speech model as context, so they start arriving spelled correctly when you dictate.
Autocorrect is the part people underestimate
Prediction and correction are what you use on the days you never press the microphone at all, which is most days for most people, and they are also where a new keyboard feels worst. SwiftKey has your habits. A fresh install does not, and no amount of on-device dictation compensates for a keyboard that keeps correcting your friend's name to something else.
LocalType does the ordinary things properly: corrections as you go, next-word suggestions from a dictionary matched to the language you have set, and the layouts people expect in the countries that use them. It also lets you feed it your own vocabulary by hand, which shortens the settling-in period and improves dictation at the same time, since one app is handling both halves.
The names you add first should be the ones you type most: the people you message daily, the street you live on, the two or three technical terms your job runs on. Those are the corrections that make a new keyboard feel wrong, and they are the quickest ones to fix.
Run both, and decide later
Keep SwiftKey enabled while you try something else. Android allows several keyboards at once and moving between them takes one tap from the keyboard selector, so you can use the new one for a fortnight and fall back mid-sentence whenever it frustrates you.
There is no uninstall step in that experiment and nothing to undo afterwards. If the new one has not earned its place by the time you stop noticing which keyboard is open, remove it and keep the one that has.
Which question are you asking
If you want a better keyboard than SwiftKey, that is not the argument. SwiftKey is excellent at what it does and it is free.
If you want the same everyday convenience with the voice half handled on your own device, that is a different requirement, and it is the one LocalType was built for.