Flour on your hands, and one clean knuckle
Your hands are wet, floury or covered in something. The thing you need to write down is small and immediate: an ingredient you have run out of, a time to set, a change to the recipe you will forget by tomorrow.
Typing means washing and drying your hands, which is enough friction that most people simply do not, and then forget.
Speaking is the right shape for that, and the first thing to say about it is that it is not hands-free. You still wake the phone, open something with a text field, and press the microphone key. That needs one clean finger and a screen willing to be touched, and a kitchen does not reliably supply either.
Dictation removes the typing, which is the expensive part. It does not remove the touching, which is one tap. Everybody who ends up doing this regularly arrives at the same trick: keep one knuckle clean and start with that.
Prop the phone against a jar
Ten seconds of arrangement at the start of cooking beats a fresh fumble every time you think of something.
Stand the phone against a jar, or lean it on the tin you have just opened, screen up, with the note already open. Starting then takes a knuckle and nothing else, the microphone is near your mouth rather than across the room, and you can read what appeared without picking anything up.
That is less impressive than shouting at a device from the sink, and it is the version you will still be using on an ordinary Tuesday evening.
If you cook from a recipe on the same phone, one arrangement covers both jobs: the recipe stays visible and the note is a tap away. If you cook from a book, put the phone flat beside it, face up, somewhere the steam from the pan does not reach.
Four things to say out loud
The running shopping list. By far the most useful case. You notice something is finished, you say it into a note, and it is there on Saturday. The alternative is remembering, which does not work.
Say the brand and the size while the empty packet is still in your hand. "Half a kilo of the coarse polenta, the yellow bag" is a better line to find on Saturday than "polenta", and it costs two seconds at the one moment when you have the evidence in front of you.
Recipe changes. The thing you did differently and want to repeat. Half a sentence, said while it is still true, is worth more than a careful note written never.
Messages while something simmers. Cooking is full of two-minute waits, which is exactly when a reply gets written or postponed for another day.
The thing you must not forget. A time, a temperature, something to tell somebody when they get home.
Five ingredients arrive as one sentence
Structured lists. Modern dictation infers punctuation from rhythm and does not produce bullet points, so five ingredients spoken in one breath arrive as a sentence with commas. Fine to read, not a list.
If you want an actual list, say the items as separate short dictations, or tidy it later. Fighting the formatting mid-cook is worse than either.
Numbers and quantities. Digits are the weakest case in all dictation, because the surrounding words rarely settle which number you meant. "Two hundred grams" usually survives; a temperature and a time in the same sentence often does not. Check anything you will actually rely on, and give an oven setting a dictation of its own so there is one number on screen to glance at.
The radio. Handle that one first, because it costs a single button and nothing else in the room does. An extractor on full and a pan going are harder to switch off halfway through cooking, and you will usually keep them running anyway; if a sentence comes back wrong with the fan on, say it again rather than going hunting for a setting.
Three minutes of preparation, once
About three minutes is what separates a good idea here from a habit.
Decide where the list lives before you need it, and use the same place every time. A note app you already have is better than a new one you will not open.
Put it one tap from the lock screen if your phone allows a shortcut. Most of the failures here are not about dictation at all; they are about the six taps between wanting to write something and being able to.
Add the words you will actually say. Brands you buy, the shop you order from, the names of dishes you make. LocalType keeps those additions on the handset and gives them to the speech model as context, so they arrive spelled correctly and not as a guess at what you said.
Choose the model for the room. A kitchen with a fan running is not a quiet environment, so the middle or larger option is usually the better fit. The measured middle case was 6.9 seconds of speech converted in 4.1 seconds on a 4 GB test phone.
Kitchens have the worst signal in the house
Back of the building, thick walls, an oven and a fridge between you and the router. Plenty of people have a dead spot exactly where they cook, and dictation that needs a connection gives up there at the moment your hands are full and you are least able to work out why.
LocalType does the recognising on the handset, out of a model file in storage no other app can open, so the kitchen behaves like any other room. Internet access is requested for one purpose, fetching the model you picked, after which the app stops asking. Nor is there an account, which removes the particular annoyance of being invited to sign in while holding a chicken.
Privacy is not why anyone dictates a shopping list, and the same arrangement settles it regardless. No advertising sits in the product, no behavioural tracking runs inside it, and nothing keeps an archive of what you dictated. Android's cloud backup is denied the app's data by design. Move into a password field and no microphone key appears.
Household writing is mundane, which is rather the point: it is not sensitive and it still does not need to be transmitted to anybody.
Saturday's shopping list
Shorter notes, taken more often, with the occasional wrong quantity.
Set that against the current arrangement, which for most people is intending to write something down, washing their hands, and discovering on the way back that they have forgotten what it was.
So after a fortnight, look at the list rather than at the transcription. Does Saturday's list have the things on it that ran out on Tuesday? Did the change you made to the sauce survive until the next time you made it? Have you stopped composing notes in your head over the sink and losing them by the time the pan is dealt with? If the answer is yes and one line of the list reads two hundred grand of flour, the arrangement is doing its job.