The blank page is a speed problem
Most stuck essays are not stuck for lack of ideas. They are stuck because writing forces you to commit to a sentence, and committing is uncomfortable while the sentence is still forming.
Speaking lowers the stakes. You can say a paragraph badly, hear that it is bad, and say it again, in the time it would take to type the first version. What comes out is not good prose. It is raw material, and raw material is what you did not have before.
Anyone who has explained their argument to a friend and thought "that is exactly what I meant, why can I not write it" already knows the mechanism. Dictation captures the explaining version.
Where it genuinely helps with studying
Getting a first draft down. Talk through the argument as if explaining it, then edit what comes out. The edit is real work, and it is far easier than starting from nothing.
Notes right after a lecture or seminar. Detail decays within the hour. Walking out of the room and speaking two minutes of what mattered captures more than a page written that evening.
Reading notes. Say what a chapter argued, in your own words, immediately after reading it. This is a genuinely effective study technique on its own, and dictation removes the friction that stops people doing it.
Revision by explanation. Explaining a topic aloud reveals what you do not understand faster than rereading it. Dictating the explanation gives you a record of where you got stuck.
Anything where writing is the barrier and the thinking is not. For students with dyslexia or difficulty writing quickly, that is not a productivity tip, it is the difference between demonstrating what you know and not.
What to type instead
Anything requiring precision as you go. Formulas, code, references, citations, foreign-language quotations. Dictation is bad at all of them and correcting is slower than typing was.
Structured documents. Headings, numbered lists, tables. Dictate the words, build the structure afterwards.
Working out what you think. Dictation is fast, and speed is exactly wrong when the task is deciding. Speed encourages you to fill the silence when you should be sitting in it.
In a library. Obvious, and it rules out a lot of student writing time.
The line you do not cross
The tools around this space have got blurry.
Dictation transcribes what you said. It does not generate arguments, summarise sources, rephrase your work into something more academic, or produce sentences you did not think of. What arrives on the page is your own words, exactly, in the order you said them.
That distinction matters for coursework, and it is why dictation sits comfortably inside almost every academic integrity policy while text generation sits outside a good many of them. You are using a different keyboard, not a different author.
If your institution has rules about assistive tools, read them, do not assume, and be aware that some policies ask you to declare use of any tool at all. LocalType does not write anything on your behalf, and being able to state that accurately is useful if you are ever asked about it.
A workflow that fits a study week
Capture immediately, edit later. Notes after lectures, thoughts on the walk home, an argument that occurs to you in the shower. All of it into whatever note app you already use, without stopping to make it good.
Draft by talking, edit by reading. Do them in separate sittings. Editing what you dictated an hour ago is far easier than editing what you dictated thirty seconds ago, because you have stopped hearing your own voice in it.
Add the vocabulary before a big piece of work. Every subject has terms a general speech model has never encountered: theorists' names, technical terms, the title of the module. Ten minutes adding them saves an hour of corrections. In LocalType those additions stay on the handset and are given to the speech model as context.
Expect to rewrite. Dictated prose is longer, looser and more repetitive than written prose. That is not a failure of the tool, it is what spoken language is, and the rewrite is where the essay actually gets made.
Why the offline part matters for students specifically
Student life happens in buildings that are hostile to mobile signal and on networks that require logging in every ninety minutes.
Lecture theatres, library basements, the train home, a shared house with awful broadband. Cloud dictation fails in all of them, and it fails at the moment you had something worth capturing.
LocalType runs the model on the phone, so none of those environments change anything. The network is contacted once, to collect the model you chose, and not again. That also means no data allowance is consumed by dictating, which matters more on a student contract than on most others.
Dictating into the middle of a paragraph
LocalType is a keyboard, so it works in whichever note app, document editor or messaging app you already use, and dictation is a key on it, not a separate application. Words land where your cursor is, so you can dictate into the middle of an existing paragraph, and that is where most of the editing-stage additions happen.
Recognition happens on the handset itself, using a model file that no other app on the phone is able to read. There is no sign-up anywhere in it and no advertising. Nothing keeps a record of how you use it, and no store is made of the audio you produced. The cloud backup Android runs is deliberately not given the app's data. Tap into a password box and the microphone key is simply not offered.
You pick one of three models, 60, 190 or 539 MB. Drafting an essay argues for the biggest one you can spare the room for, because during a long dictation you are looking at the wall rather than the screen and the waiting costs you nothing. For scale, the 190 MB option converted 6.9 seconds of talking in 4.1 seconds on the 4 GB phone used for testing. One multilingual model handles eighteen languages and works out which you used from the audio. That matters if you are studying in a language you did not grow up in.
A messier draft, faster
That is the trade: a draft produced considerably faster, that needs a proper edit.
If your problem is that nothing gets written, that trade is overwhelmingly worth it. If your problem is that you do not yet know what you think, this will not help, and neither will anything else that types quickly.
One last practical note. Give it a fortnight before deciding. The first few days of dictating feel absurd and the results are poor, mostly because talking to a phone in complete sentences is a skill nobody has practised. That skill arrives quickly, and the version of you that has had two weeks of practice gets noticeably better output than the version reviewing it on day one.