doffactory SirLordThrThird

Starting with a tl;dr... To get this to work you need GMS, you don't need to log in to Google. GBoard does all the downloading all by itself and lies about its network usage somehow in its app settings. The download is 25mb and took 9 seconds on my phone. My hypothesis about Google Play doing the download on GBoard's behalf appears to be wrong.

I was able to do voice typing with airplane mode on. I tried again with airplane mode off and network access to GBoard revoked, and it worked then too. I have no idea why you're running into problems. It's working for me each time.

You can skip the rest of this post if you don't care about what I did or what I found messing around with GBoard and getting logs via logcat.

Attempting to download with just Aurora and GBoard, no GMS:

W GooglePlayServicesUtil: com.google.android.inputmethod.latin requires the Google Play Store, but it is missing.

So, yes, you need GMS installed.

Installed via Google Play, then revoked network access to GMS:

I SpeechFactory: SpeechRecognitionFactory.updateOnDeviceUserPreference():309 On-device switch enabled by user. Triggering download.
I SpeechPackManager: SpeechPackManager.syncPacksNow():306 syncPacksNow()
I SpeechPackManager: SpeechPackManager.registerManifest():451 registerManifest() : https://dl.google.com//android/voice/gboard/en_us/ondevice_recognizer/superpacks-manifest-20220414.json
I SP      : Syncing speech-packs (34060213) with slices: [{gboard-en-US-v5101, m:b:*:*, fg}], metadata: false
I SP      : Requesting download of URL https://dl.google.com/android/voice/gboard/en-US/v5101/gboard-en-US-v5101.zip to gboard-en-US-v5101.zip.fetched (constraints: m:b:u:l)

GBoard is downloading the speech packs by itself (I didn't copy and paste its download successful message).

GMS installed, not logged in, no network privs. Installed via Aurora:

I SP      : Download stopped: speech-packs:gboard-en-US-v5101, succeeded foreground, size: 90844371

      SirLordThrThird @MetropleX I have the same behavior with translators (no google play
      services installed). It would be great a fake airplane mode for some apps in addition of network permission.

        My issue was that my keyboard language was English (Canada). To get this to work, I added the English (US) language and switched to it by long-pressing the space bar. When I'm done voice typing, I switch back to English (Canada).

        Another frustrating caveat: If you have any language installed that supports multilingual typing with English (US) (such as French (Canada)), offline voice typing will not work for English (US), even if multilingual typing is disabled.

        Side question: Does anyone know where to find an official list of offline voice typing languages supported in gboard?

          kyuweftea

          Our new all-neural, on-device Gboard speech recognizer is initially being launched to all Pixel phones in American English only.

          Source: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/03/an-all-neural-on-device-speech.html

          Would appear that things haven't changed since as I can't find mention of any other languages being made available anywhere.

          Wonder if @Wonderfall uses it for French as well as English?

              MetropleX Thanks for taking a look! Also, I just discovered a way to get an up to date list:

              1. Install Speech Services by Google
              2. Enable Google Voice Typing keyboard
              3. Go to some text field and switch to the Google Voice Typing keyboard
              4. Tap the gear icon
              5. Under Offline speech, tap Add a language

              Looks like there's just 4 more variants of English (no Canada 😢 ) and 4 other languages (including Français (France) ).

                unwat Same. Only, mine stopped working about a week later when I turned on the Spanish Keyboard & the English Keyboard at the same time. Apparently it couldn't decide which was which unless connected to the internet.

                I rarely used voice-to-text anyhow, so I ended up disabling it and ultimately going back to the Graphene OS keyboard, which works great for my uses. If it had voice-to-text, I'd probably still use it on occasion, but I don't miss it.

                    Colvdv Same here. The only thing I am missing is contoured keys from GrapheneOS keyboard and glide typing

                      MetropleX Hi, I did had network disabled for Google Play Services.

                      I tried again yesterday. I deleted GBoard, installed again and left network access on for about 24 hours, after enabling "Faster voice typing". All that time I was using the keyboard (not using voice typing).

                      Now, same thing happens. If I disable network for GBoard, it's stuck on "Initializing" when trying to use it.
                      BUT, if I keep it disabled, but I also use airplane mode, voice typing works flawlessly.

                      So I assume the problem is that the app believes it should be able to reach google when network access is disabled but airplane mode is off. So it waits for a connection attempt to timeout and that's what I'm seeing.

                      Is there any solution?

                      I have 3 languages in my keyboard, English and 2 other European languages.

                      If I remove the other 2 and leave only US English, voice typing works with Gtalk network disabled.

                      Now I added just 1 of the 2 extra languages and I'm going to leave it with network access allowed for a few hours and try again.

                          SirLordThrThird Another option you can try is to enable the Google Voice Typing keyboard in settings, and use it for voice-to-text instead of gboard.

                            2 months later

                            I made a new profile and installed Gboard and Google Play services. I enabled "faster voice typing" and after a while I revoked network access permissions on Gboard and was able to use voice dictation without any problems.

                            I then tried the same thing on my main "owner" profile, and cannot get it to work no matter what I do. If I revoke network permissions on Gboard, voice dictation does not work and I just get a message saying "cannot connect to google right now".

                            I'm totally confused. Does anyone have a solution for this?

                            Just an FYI, if you can't get it to work and have to have voice typing, you can try Sayboard. https://github.com/ElishaAz/Sayboard

                            I've been using it for a few months. It's no Google Voice typing (i.e. with auto capitalization, punctuation etc.) but it works well enough.

                            6 months later

                            Just did this myself using this thread's input and I think I got how it works:

                            1. First of all, offlline dictation does NOT work with "Multilingual typing". If you have more than one language, you have to open each language and disable multilingual typing on every single one of them.

                            2. Play Services is not needed to download the offline stuff. However the "Faster voice typing" toggle was not enabled without it. So you need Play Services with network just to enable faster voice typing. After you enable it, you can remove its network permission and even uninstall it. It's not necessary to actually download anything.

                            3. WiFi seems to be needed for the download. Turn WiFi on, enable network for gboard, wait 10s and remove gboard's permission.

                            That did it for me.