The touching does not go away
Voice typing is not hands-free.
To dictate, you open an app, tap a text field, tap the microphone key, speak, and usually glance at the result before sending. Every one of those is an interaction with a screen. Replacing typing with speaking removes some of the looking and none of the touching.
Anything sold to you as hands-free messaging is either a voice assistant, which is a different product entirely, or it is overstating what dictation does.
Road rules on using a phone while driving vary by country and change over time. They apply to you and not to your software. Check what applies where you drive.
Where it genuinely helps around driving
Not while moving. Around the driving, which is where most of the value turns out to be anyway.
Before you set off. The reply you owe someone, dictated in twenty seconds while parked. The alternative is a red light, or never at all.
At a stop. Waiting at a level crossing, in a queue for a ferry, parked outside a client's office ten minutes early. These are the moments the backlog gets cleared.
The moment you arrive. Notes from the conversation you just had, spoken into your phone before walking in, while the detail is still exact.
Between appointments. Anyone driving between jobs, sites or visits produces a stream of small write-ups, and dictating them in the car park is the difference between accurate records and approximate ones.
That last one is the real use case, and it has nothing to do with driving while distracted. It is about the phone being usable in the two minutes before you turn the key.
Why the connection matters more in a car than anywhere
If you drive regularly, this is the part that decides which dictation you want.
Roads are where mobile coverage is worst and most inconsistent. Motorway cuttings, tunnels, rural stretches, multi-storey car parks, industrial estates, underground loading bays. Coverage comes and goes constantly at speed.
Cloud dictation fails in exactly those places, and it fails badly rather than cleanly: it waits, times out, or loses the note you just recorded. The timing could not be worse: you are trying to capture something before you forget it and then drive off.
On-device recognition removes the variable. LocalType keeps the speech model on the phone, so a car park under a building behaves identically to your kitchen. The network is contacted once, to collect the model you picked, and never again.
There is a data argument too. Anyone driving all day on a metered plan is uploading audio every time they dictate with a cloud service, and paying a slow trickle of charges for something that never needed to leave the handset.
Bluetooth and car microphones
Read this if you dictate around a vehicle.
Which microphone Android hands to an app depends on the device and the headset or car system profile in use, and it does not always choose the one you expect. A car microphone is usually mounted for phone calls, so it sits aimed at the driver's seat and is tuned for speech at a distance, and the further you sit from a microphone, the less of your voice is left to work with.
If results are poor while connected to a car system, testing with the connection off tells you quickly whether that was the cause. Often the phone's own microphone, held closer, does better than a far-field microphone in a headliner.
A car is also acoustically hostile: engine noise, road noise, wind, ventilation. All of it mixes into the same signal as your voice and cannot be separated afterwards. That argues for the larger model if you dictate in a vehicle regularly, since capacity is what handles noise. On the 4 GB test handset the middle 190 MB option converted 6.9 seconds of speech in 4.1 seconds, and the 539 MB one takes roughly twice the time you spent speaking.
What to set up in advance
Doing this while stationary, once, removes the temptation to fiddle later.
Download the model at home on Wi-Fi and confirm it works, so there is no half-finished download waiting to fail somewhere with no signal.
Add the vocabulary you will actually dictate: client names, site names, street names, the products you deliver or install. Those additions stay on the phone and are given to the speech model as context, and for anyone dictating job notes they are the difference between usable records and a page of approximations.
Decide the model size deliberately. Vehicle noise argues for the larger end if your phone can hold it.
What dictation will not do for you
Three things dictation does not do for you, and overstating any of them behind a steering wheel has consequences.
It will not read messages to you. It writes, it does not speak.
It will not operate without you touching the phone. There is no wake word and nothing listening between dictations. That was a deliberate design decision and the right one for a keyboard, and it does mean a tap is required.
It will not make using a phone while driving acceptable. That is a matter for the law where you are and for your own judgement, and no feature list changes it.
Why coverage stops mattering
LocalType is a keyboard with a microphone key, so it works in whatever messaging, notes or job app you already use, and the words land in the field you were in with nothing to copy.
The model file sits on the handset where no other app can open it, and the recognition happens there. Coverage therefore stops mattering the moment the model is downloaded. Nothing needs registering, advertising is absent, nothing inside the product records what you do with it, recordings are not archived, and Android's cloud backup is deliberately not given the app's data. Tap into a password box and no microphone key appears there at all.
Eighteen languages come from a single multilingual model, identified from the recording, which matters for anyone driving across borders for work.
A note for people whose job is the road
Delivery drivers, engineers, carers, surveyors, anyone who visits several places a day and has to write something about each one.
For that pattern, dictation is not a convenience feature. The realistic alternative is not typing the notes; it is writing them at the end of the day from memory, or not writing them at all. Fifteen seconds spoken in the van after each visit produces records nobody was going to produce otherwise.
Two things make or break it. The vocabulary, because job notes are almost entirely proper nouns, and the connection, because the places this work happens are precisely the places coverage is worst. Both are addressed above, and both are better sorted on the first day, before a fortnight of irritation goes by.
Not a driving feature
Dictation is not a driving feature. It is a stationary feature that happens to be enormously useful to people who drive, because their writing happens in car parks, at stops and in the minutes before and after a job.
For that use, working without a signal is not a nice extra. It is the entire requirement.