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.