Google’s new voice recognition system works instantly and offline (Pixel only)

"But it’s sort of funny considering hardly any of Google’s other products work offline. Are you going to dictate into a shared document while you’re offline? Write an email? Ask for a conversion between liters and cups? You’re going to need a connection for that!"

While offline, you might write email drafts, your blog, or even a book:

https://medium.com/@augustbirch/what-i-learned-writing-an-en...

What's missing is the ability to make edits using your phone. You can probably speak at over 100 words a minute but then you need to stop to bring up the software keyboard.

Just to be clear: This has nothing to do with "Wake Words" (e.g. OK Google, Alexa, Hey Siri, etc) which have always been handled offline/locally.

This is translating what you said after the wake word from voice to text on the local [Pixel] hardware rather than sending it into Google's Cloud.

The biggest benefits here are speed and reliability. It could also handle some actions offline.

Google AI blog: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-sp...

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06621

Didn't they advertise something like this a few years ago? I seem to remember trying it and finding that it didn't really work as well as the online recognition at the time.

EDIT: Looks like something was added in Jelly Bean: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17616994/offline-speech-...

Dictation works offline on iPhone since iOS10