Does Voice-to-Text Require An Internet Connection?

You might already know that voice-to-text software can significantly speed up your typing. Your hands also won’t get tired due to typing if you use speech-to-text software to transcribe your speech.

However, you might wonder whether you need an internet connection for voice-to-text software. In this article, we explain how offline and online speech recognition software works and how you can use offline speech recognition software without any internet connection.

Does voice-to-text software require an internet connection?

Online voice-to-text software requires an internet connection. On the other hand, offline voice-to-text software doesn’t require an internet connection.

Online voice-to-text software, like Google Voice typing, sends your voice data to remote servers for the transcription process. Those remote servers convert your voice to text transcription and send it back to your computer. Therefore, online voice-to-text software can’t work without an internet connection.

On the other hand, offline voice-to-text software performs the voice-to-text transcription operation using your computer’s CPU or GPU. Therefore, offline software doesn’t have to send your voice data to remote servers and doesn’t require an internet connection.

Does voice-to-text work in airplane mode?

The airplane mode of your laptop or smartphone disables internet connectivity. It turns off your Wi-Fi adapter and disconnects you from the internet. As a result, online voice-to-text software can’t work in airplane mode.

On the other hand, offline voice-to-text software doesn’t require an internet connection. So they work without any issues even in airplane mode.

However, some laptops and smartphones allow you to turn on Wi-Fi even in airplane mode. In that case, your online voice-to-text software will also work even in airplane mode.

Advantages of offline voice-to-text software

Offline voice-to-text software allows you to transcribe your speech to text even without an internet connection. They also give you better privacy because all your voice data remain within your computer and doesn’t leave the internet.

Offline voice recognition software can also be more responsive and have lower latency than online recognition software. If you have a decent computer, you will get your text transcriptions very quickly because your voice data doesn’t have to go to a remote server.

Disadvantages of offline voice-to-text software

Offline voice-to-text software also has a few disadvantages. With offline speech recognition software, all the processing is done on your computer. So your computer should be fast enough to give you real-time performance.

If you have a slow CPU or if you have very little RAM on your computer, your offline voice-to-text software might struggle to work at a decent level.

How to perform speech recognition without an Internet connection

If you have a Windows computer, you can use SpeechPulse to transcribe your voice-to-text in real time without an internet connection. SpeechPulse also supports transcribing speech from multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian.

SpeechPulse also has decent accuracy for non-native accents. Thanks to whisper language models, your non-native speech will easily get transcribed with decent accuracy.