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As you know, on Nexus One you can use voice input to enter text by speaking.

Unfortunately, if you are disconnected from the Internet (even temporarily), this feature is unavailable.

Why?

On my Windows laptop I can do this without being connected to the Internet.

Can you explain?

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The Android implementation of Talk-To-Text sends your voice to Google's servers, parses your speech into text, then sends the text string back to the handset. Without access to the internet, it's unable to transmit your voice data to their servers.

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  • That's a great answer, thanks. Do you know why can't Android parse speech internally (just like Windows does) without sending the voice to Google's servers?
    – rAndy
    Jan 28, 2011 at 2:05
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    My guess would be that the required libraries, software, etc would just bloat up the phone unnecessarily, so they decided to offset the parsing onto Google's servers. Text-To-Speech may be trivial for a laptop/desktop, but I'm sure the technologies behind it require a fair amount of processing power and storage space, which are somewhat limited on phones.
    – c0mp13371331337
    Jan 28, 2011 at 2:35
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    I believe that the phone could do it, because I was using Dragon on a PC back in the day. That PC was slower than my phone.
    – Zan Lynx
    Jan 28, 2011 at 5:26
  • Phone can actually do it. But whether to do it on phone or on a server depends on the implementation decided by the parent company (in this case Google). There are advantages and disadvantages of both implementation - When implemented through server, then phone doesn't need to download entire language DB, doesn't need to do heavy processing. But the biggest advantage is that server can improve with every processed word and result of that improvement will reach to user without he doing anything.
    – Sumit Nathany
    Jun 15, 2016 at 16:30

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